Guidance from Dr. Brodhead [Updated Twice]

[Update, 6.31pm, 23 Feb.: Business Week reports that Duke and AIG have settled their lawsuit, which resulted from AIG's unwillingness to shoulder at least some the defense costs associated with the lawsuits against Duke filed by the falsely accused players and other former Duke lacrosse players.]

Two tangentially related items [with an update at end, added Sunday, 3.34pm]:

First, in one respect, the discovery that Richard Brodhead was selected by the President of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,Leslie Berlowitz, to co-chair “a national commission to bolster teaching and research in the humanities and social sciences, fields that are critical to culture, education, and to America's economic competitiveness” is beyond belief. Incredibly, Berlowitz was responding to a request from members of Congress, to ascertain, “What are the top ten actions that Congress, state governments, universities, foundations, educators, individual benefactors, and others should take now to maintain national excellence in humanities and social scientific scholarship and education, and to achieve long-term national goals for our intellectual and economic well-being; for a stronger, more vibrant civil society; and for the success of cultural diplomacy in the 21^st century?”

Upon what could Brodhead offer counsel: how to stand clear of the social sciences and humanities faculty mob on campus? How to issue an apology months after the fact, while repeatedly promoting those among his social sciences and humanities professoriate who misbehaved? How he felt as members of the Durham Chamber of Commerce applauded him in April 2006, when he announced, of Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty, “Whatever they did [drink beer and attend a party they played no role in planning] was bad enough”?

In another respect, however, the award demonstrates a central theme of the lacrosse case: the almost complete lack of accountability in contemporary higher education for inappropriate conduct that was based on prevailing race/class/gender sentiments on campus. That a figure such as Brodhead wasn’t completely discredited for his mishandling of the lacrosse case isn’t surprising in an academy where Group of 88 members Baker, Farred, and Payne got hired away from Duke for better jobs; or where the Duke faculty elected Group regular Paula McClain as their leader shortly after the AG declared the students to be innocent; or where several members of the Group of 88 have received deanships despite (because of?) their behavior in the lacrosse case.

Second, the Florida International University administration declined to suspend the university’s star baseball player, Garrett Wittels, who was charged with sexual assault in a strange case in the Bahamas.

The specifics of the case, based on press reports: Wittels and two college-age friends went back to a hotel room to hook up with two women who presented themselves as college students but were in fact 17 years old. Both sides agree that sexual intercourse occurred; Wittels’ attorney says it was voluntary, at the prompting of their fathers the next morning, the 17-year-olds said it was not. Before any additional investigation took place, but apparently acting consistently with both Bahamian judicial procedures and more general pressure from the U.S. embassy, Wittels and his friends were arrested.

The FIU decision has generated predictable outcry. Miami Herald columnist Linda Robertson hyperbolically demanded Wittels’ suspension, noting, “No one except the people in a Paradise Island hotel room knows what happened inside it Dec. 20. But something happened.”(Despite Robertson’s insinuation, no one involved in the case denies that “something happened.”) Consistent with longstanding media practices, Robertson had no trouble repeatedly using Wittels’ name, but refused to identify the name of Wittels’ accuser.

Perhaps more disappointingly (given the high standards in the lacrosse case from the Duke Chronicle), the FIU student newspaper, The Beacon, advocated suspending Wittels, arguing, “Even if Wittels is innocent, the situation he has put himself in has tarnished the image of the University and its Athletics department. Furthermore, allowing that distraction in the locker room would be a disservice to the entire baseball team.” If universities around the country followed the policy of suspending athletes for engaging in a “situation” like that of Wittels “even if . . . innocent” (hooking up, in a somewhat boorish fashion, while on vacation), there’d be an awful lot of suspensions, on a lot of different teams, around the country.

I’d like to think that in handling the Wittels matter, the FIU administration learned from Brodhead’s rush to judgment in the lacrosse case, and in particular understood the significance of examining the particular context of the allegations. As both Robertson and The Beacon note, Wittels might, in fact, be guilty. But the preponderance of publicly available evidence doesn’t suggest abandoning the presumption of innocence; and the overall allegation (an alleged 3-on-2 gang rape, in which the accusers voluntarily left the scene of the alleged attack without even attempting to contact law enforcement officials) would be very unusual indeed. Perhaps more important, the FIU administration took into account the different legal procedures in The Bahamas, which appears to have an arrest-first, ask-questions-later approach.

A final point: at least based on what I’ve seen from press reports and from speaking to a friend with contacts at FIU, there has been no equivalent of the Group of 88 on the FIU campus. Perhaps Wahneema Lubiano can be dispatched to South Florida to provide guidance.

[Update: On Sunday morning's Outside the Lines, ESPN profiled San Antonio Spurs player Gary Neal.

Towson--which accepted Neal as a student and a basketball player despite the rape allegations, under the "innocent until proven guilty" mantra, provides another, FIU-like, example of the anti-Brodhead. And Towson acted before the lacrosse case erupted, suggesting an alternative path for Duke.

Two other items from the report. One, the Neal saga confirms a post made some time back on the absurdity of the claim--repeatedly offered during the lacrosse case--that if the lacrosse defendants had been African-American, the media would have treated them much worse. The allegations against the LaSalle basketball players (African-American defendants, race of accuser unclear) received fairly minor national coverage (the New York Times, for instance, ran 12 articles on the LaSalle case, five of which were on the acquittal or the attempts of the accused players or their coaches to move on from the scandal).

Second, the ESPN report is sympathetic to Neal. It allows him to discuss the "stigma" of the charges, notes that the charges cost him a scholarship and any chance of playing in the NBA immediately after college, and shows how even unproven charges can have horrific effects on the wrongly accused. Yet even this sympathetic account, and even after a trial that resulted in an acquittal, cannot bring itself to remove the mask of anonymity from Neal's accuser.]

The Wonderful World of Nicole Kubon

Every so often, a post or comment comes along that even I find extraordinary. Such was the case with a recent post by Nicole Kubon, a self-described “modern day feminist, struggling between the desire for social change and bitterness towards the depraved decadence of our backward culture."

Kubon, who claims to possess a Masters’ Degree in social work from the University of Michigan, posted an item stating, “If you like the Duke Lacrosse Team because they are really good at running around, throwing balls to each other in little nets, and getting high after games, it might be hard to hear that they allgot inordinately drunk and sexually assaulted a stripper they hired for their drunkfest.” [emphasis added]

Not even the false accuser Crystal Mangum ever claimed that she was sexually assaulted by all the people at the party (though she did seem to make one assertion, which she quickly retracted, that 20 people had raped her). And, more generally, I was curious as to what evidence Kubon possessed to substantiate her assertion, and in particular whether she had read the official reports of the North Carolina State Bar and the North Carolina Attorney General’s Office.

In reply to an e-mail from me, Kubon asserted that in making her claims, she relied on this March 26, 2006 posting from Brendan Nyhan. Yet this particular Nyhan post was far from his last word on the matter--it certainly didn't reflect his overall views on the lacrosse case--and all the post did was to (correctly) suggest that the story was likely to get a lot of attention and to alert readers to the (error-riddled) Khanna N&O “interview” with Mangum.* In this respect, Kubon is sort of an extreme version of the Group of 88, someone who rushed to judgment about the case and then simply closed her mind to any and all inconvenient data points that emerged thereafter. Even most of the Group of 88, however, are not so fantastically closed-minded. (Houston Baker, Grant Farred, and perhaps Wahneema Lubiano would fall into Kubon territory.) In a follow-up e-mail, Kubon then retracted her claim that she had relied on the March 2006 blog post for her own writings, but refused to supply any additional material on which she based her assertions. She also declined to state whether or not she had read the AG’s report.

Quite oddly, Kubon further informed me that her original post hadn’t proclaimed that all (or even any) of the lacrosse players were guilty. I’m not sure how else anyone would interpret the following line: “They all got inordinately drunk and sexually assaulted a stripper they hired for their drunkfest.” [emphasis added]

Kubon also appeared to be quite angry that commenters had criticized her . . . cavalier . . . use of facts. She promised that, since she “believe[s] that something happened that night,” she will not issue a correction of her post, and that she has no obligation to actually substantiate her claims with facts or evidence.

It is, to put it mildly, rather difficult to come up with a response, other than utter contempt, to a figure who all but gloats about her closed-mindedness while making heinous accusations against people.

*--modified for clarity, and to stress that, given his position as a Duke-based blogger as of 3-26-06, there was nothing, in any way, improper about Nyhan's post.

Four Updates

In an expected move, Crystal Mangum will not be re-tried on the most serious arson charge that she faced. What message the jury’s original majority-acquittal vote sends to Durham is anyone’s guess.

--

In another unsurprising move, a new (albeit minor) demonstration of the continuing vise the Group of 88 and their allies exercise over Duke. The issue is the five-year review process for Blair Sheppard, dean of the Duke business school.

It would be hard to come up with an area of the academy further away from the Group’s race/class/gender vision than the business school. Yet the six-person review committee includes two Group members—Paula McClain (the political science professor who said she wouldn’t publicly call for Mike Nifong to respect due process in his treatment of Duke students) and Cathy Davidson (she of the fact-challenged, “revisionist” interpretation of spring 2006 events at Duke). A third member of the committee is the “vice provost for faculty diversity.” The administrator’s purview, of course, does not include pedagogical or intellectual diversity.

Does anyone want to bet against the proposition that the McClain committee will recommend the business school adopting new measures for certain types of “diversity”?

--

An item at least tangentially related to the civil suit. Ames et al v. County of Harford, Maryland et al is a lawsuit by various anti-abortion rights activists against police and municipal officials in Maryland. As in the lacrosse civil suits, the Maryland police and municipalities filed motions to dismiss the case, citing Ashcroft v. Iqbal, which they (like the Duke/Durham defendants) contended should shield them before discovery could commence.

In May, a district court judge dismissed the motion; and a Fourth Circuit appeals court panel has just upheld the decision, thereby allowing the suit to continue. Two passages from the district court decision that should resonate to anyone who followed the lacrosse case:

“The Court finds that the qualified immunity issue cannot be resolved at the current time because of the fact-dependent nature of the required inquiry and the undeveloped status of the record.” The Maryland case can’t hold a candle to the lacrosse case in this regard, given the reams of e-mails likely available from the Duke and Durham defendants.

And, as to the standard that the court should use, in cases like the lacrosse case and the Maryland case where claims of civil rights violations are involved: “Where, as here, the Defendants seek to dismiss the Plaintiffs’ civil rights complaint, this court ‘must be especially solicitous of the wrongs alleged’ and ‘must not dismiss the claim unless it appears to a certainty that the plaintiff would not be entitled to relief under any legal theory which might plausibly be suggested by the facts alleged.’” [emphasis in original]

--

Finally, for those concerned about the lax editorial standards at The Atlantic, the letter to the editor form is here.

With Malice Toward Some

When the lacrosse case first broke, politically correct members of the media (such as Selena Roberts) and race/class/gender faculty ideologues (most spectacularly the Group of 88) rushed to exploit it. And then the case to which they had attached their reputations imploded. It’s not hard to imagine Caitlin Flanagan speaking for them in the January Atlantic, as she seethed, “The [falsely] accused players’ improbable turn as victimized solid citizens was the most unpleasant result of the D.A.’s bungled case.”

Yet the lacrosse case was not the ostensible subject of Flanagan’s article. Instead, in an effort that has attracted widespread condemnation, Flanagan sought to apply a Group of 88-style race/class/gender analysis to the Karen Owen “thesis.” (In the words of the Chronicle’s arts and entertainment supplement editor, “Flanagan’s a hack and the worst kind of pundit; after years of her hysterical essays, this is common knowledge. But that doesn’t excuse The Atlantic for having printed pages of what is essentially deception, unprofessionalism and, in at least one instance, outright lies.”) Indeed, the piece was so poorly argued that even the Group of 88’s resident apologist, Prof. Robert Zimmerman, felt compelled to—albeit somewhat gently—criticize Flanagan.

One item in the article offers a particular insight into the almost malicious manner in which Flanagan approached her task—and in the process raises some troubling questions about standards at The Atlantic.

In an article ostensibly about Karen Owen’s “thesis,” Flanagan devoted 11.9 percent of her words to a very negative portrayal of members of the 2006 Duke lacrosse team. Of that total, 472 words focused in some way on thesis “Subject 1,” a lacrosse player. Here’s how Flanagan described him: “His blandly handsome face and powerfully built body had taken on the cast of a thug rapist and then of a hapless sex partner who couldn’t even keep it up long enough to satisfy an inexperienced co-ed.”

I e-mailed Atlantic editor James Bennet to ask why The Atlantic (which I regularly read) allowed one of its authors to include such a gratuitously insulting passage about anyone, much less a then-college student. Literary editor and national editor Benjamin Schwarz, who supervised the production of Flanagan’s article, replied that he didn’t consider the item above to be insulting(!), in part because The Atlantic didn’t identify “Subject 1.” In the internet era, finding Subject 1’s identity takes less than a minute; Schwarz’s rationalization doesn’t pass the laugh test.

More problematic is why Flanagan devoted any attention to Subject 1, or any of his teammates. (She wrote that it was “impossible” for her not to do so—an argument by assertion.) By Flanagan’s own admission, the turning point in Owen’s experience came when Subject 2, a tennis player, allegedly treated Owen shabbily. Yet Flanagan’s article gave no sign that the author conducted any additional research into the personal background of Subject 2. (Flanagan didn’t specifically mention any of Owen’s other subjects at all.) About Subject 1, on the other hand, she tracked down references in police reports of the lacrosse case. Here’s what Flanagan wrote:

In fact, the man identified as Subject 1 in Owen’s PowerPoint was a member of that very team, present and accounted for at the ugly party and named in several of the police reports garnered about the night. Player Dan Flannery said that when he “tried to apologize and reason with” one of the strippers in a bedroom of the house, Subject 1 may have been with him, and David Evans told police that Subject 1 at one point followed the women out into the street.

This passage is peculiar for a couple of reasons. First, most reasonable people would deem what the reports say about Subject 1’s conduct (at a party he played absolutely no role in organizing) to be basically commendable: he tried to soothe Kim Roberts’ anger after another team member treated Roberts crassly; and he helped transport the mentally imbalanced and possibly drug-addled Crystal Mangum to Roberts’ car. Yet Flanagan managed to insinuate, without saying anything concrete, that Subject 1 might have behaved inappropriately. Second, Flanagan tossed out references to other lacrosse players (Flannery, Evans) who had no relationship of any type to the Owen affair and who were mentioned nowhere else in Flanagan’s article. To Benjamin Schwarz, I wondered what possible rationale could exist for their inclusion; he responded that I could write a letter to the editor.

Since Flanagan seemed so intent on researching Subject 1’s background, it’s curious that her extended coverage of him neglected to include any of the positive references to his character available in the public record: that he was a strong student; that he showed considerable courage in speaking out publicly, before the tide turned, on behalf of his falsely accused teammates; and that in fall 2006 he spent considerable time registering voters in Durham and volunteering in the campaign to oust rogue prosecutor Mike Nifong. These items, of course, didn’t conform to Flanagan’s negative portrayal of Subject 1, so Atlantic readers never found out about them.

It’s not as if Flanagan is a neo-Puritan, determined to condemn anyone whose behavior on sexual matters would be out of place at BYU or Liberty University. She oozes sympathy for false accuser Mangum, whom she describes as one of “two desperately poor women, one of them a mother of two, both with lives shaped around more sorrow and misery than the average Duke lacrosse player could begin to imagine.”

We know that Flanagan pored through lacrosse-case police files in her research about Subject 1. Therefore, the Atlantic writer was exposed to several items about Mangum’s economic status: that she (allegedly) was a full-time student at a local university; that she had two private drivers to ferry her to and from work and, it seems, to other appointments; and that she had regular access to a doctor and to prescription drugs, suggesting that Mangum (unlike tens of millions of Americans) probably had some form of health insurance. I suspect that few, if any, Atlantic readers would consider an (allegedly) full-time student with personal drivers and health insurance to be “desperately” poor.

There are ways to portray Mangum as a victim (chiefly by suggesting that she fell through the cracks of the nation’s mental health system, perhaps by noting that she seemed to have problems with alcohol or prescription drugs), but neither of those narratives would have advanced the class-based argument about the lacrosse players that Flanagan wanted to make. So Mangum was described as desperately poor despite the conflicting evidence, and Atlantic fact-checkers either didn’t care or looked the other way.

But by far the most disturbing aspect of Flanagan’s article involved a basic issue of journalistic ethics. Flanagan’s entire assault upon the character of Subject 1 hinged upon one verifiable item: that Owen and the lacrosse player actually hooked up. If not, the player was the victim of not one but two cruel hoaxes—one solely on his character (Owen), the other briefly alleging criminal behavior (Mangum).

Based on the PowerPoint’s details, it seems to me likelier than not that Owen and Subject 1 did hook up (the details of the affair, of course, could very well be a product of Owen’s imagination). Yet I always had assumed that magazines like The Atlantic attempted to verify facts when possible, rather than simply going on hunches. So I asked both Bennet and Schwarz why the magazine—and again, The Atlantic isn’t a tabloid; it purports to have high journalistic standards—did not have someone contact Subject 1, if not to give him a chance to respond to Flanagan’s character assault then only to confirm that he in fact knew Owen.

Bennet didn’t respond; Schwarz (twice) declined to answer the question. So the magazine refused to explain why its representatives never even attempted to confirm what turned out to be a critical item in Flanagan’s article. For Flanagan and The Atlantic, it seems, this aspect of Owen’s story was too good not to be true—journalistic ethics be damned.

The Atlantic is one of the two magazines (National Journal is the other) whose articles I often have assigned in my classes. Having been exposed first-hand to the publication’s lax editorial standards, I certainly won’t repeat that mistake.

Why the Civil Suit Matters

I’ve received a few questions on the status of the civil trial; my response would be that the civil case exemplifies what happens when one side (in this case Duke and Durham) has everything to gain and nothing to lose by delay. Even if the case makes it to trial and Duke/Durham prevails, it would be a loser for the duo, since the trial’s revelations almost certainly would place them in a terrible light.

Quite beyond bringing sunlight to corrupt Durham institutions, however, the civil suit has practical importance to the falsely accused players, of which I was reminded again when reading a post by PR guru Jack O’Dwyer. O’Dwyer’s post ostensibly analyzed the media’s response to the sexual assault charges against FIU baseball player Garrett Wittels and two of Wittels’ friends. Yet the Wittels case has almost nothing in common with the lacrosse case (beyond the fact that both sets of allegations seemed, initially, quite implausible). In the Wittels case, neither side denied that sexual contact of some type occurred. In the Wittels case, no one has alleged that the prosecutor acted unethically, or that the police used an improper lineup. The FIU president hasn’t suspended the baseball season, or fired the baseball coach; and FIU faculty members haven’t signed a guilt-presuming public statement or participated in protests outside Wittels’ house. Nor is the local paper (in this case, the Miami Herald) using its coverage to frame the case against Wittels.

Nonetheless, O’Dwyer decided to write about the lacrosse case—using as his source, for reasons that he never explained, the Wilson/Glater New York Times article. O’Dwyer seemed unaware that both Times executive editor Bill Keller and then-sports editor Tom Jolly had, many months after the fact, apologized for the Times’ coverage.

Having relied upon this discredited version of events, O’Dwyer informed his readers that Nifong “said he was hit with a ‘stonewall of silence’ by the Duke team” without ever mentioning that this public claim was false (the captains voluntarily gave statements and DNA samples; nearly two dozen lacrosse players subsequently gave statements to SBI investigators).

And O’Dwyer informed his readers that “semen of one of the Duke students was found beside the toilet at about the same spot where Mangum said she had spat out semen from someone who orally raped her. Semen of another Duke student was found on a rag in the hallway near his bedroom. Mangum claimed that someone had wiped her vagina with a rag” without mentioning that neither sample included DNA from Mangum, as would have occurred had any of Mangum’s myriad, mutually contradictory tales have been true.

And O’Dwyer informed his readers that found ‘blunt force trauma’ that was ‘consistent with the sexual assault that was alleged by the victim’” without mentioning that the subsequent AG’s inquiry found no objective evidence to substantiate Levicy’s claims—a finding aided, of course, by the fact that Levicy had not noted any “blunt force trauma” in her contemporaneous written report.

Of Nifong’s misconduct (his ethically improper public statements; his ordering the police to run a new lineup confined to suspects, in violation of DPD rules; his lying to the court; his violating North Carolina law by failing to report all results from the DNA tests) O’Dwyer wrote only, “Various irregularities were also found in the way [Nifong] presented the case.”

There were villains, however: O’Dwyer chastised the lacrosse players’ attorneys for “having conducted a massive PR campaign aimed at discrediting Nifong and Mangum." Yet the public statements of the defense attorneys rarely mentioned Mangum’s character, not least because Mangum’s chosen profession, arrest record, and use of large amounts of prescription drugs were all in the public record. Moreover, O’Dwyer conveniently overlooked how Nifong gave more than a dozen interviews (with local, state, and national media) before the attorneys for the lacrosse players spoke to any reporter; and that Nifong’s publicity barrage continued right up until a lengthy late December 2006 interview with the New York Times. In O’Dwyer’s world, these comments apparently get a pass, but defense attorneys should have remained silent.

In a subsequent conversation, O’Dwyer informed me that, in his opinion, the case needed to go to trial, and dismissed Nifong’s ethical offenses as trivial. O’Dwyer’s position, carried to its logical conclusion, would mean that anytime anyone accuses someone of any criminal wrongdoing, the case must go to trial—regardless of the credibility of the charges, and regardless of whether the authorities commit misconduct in handling the case. You don’t have to be a card-carrying member of the ACLU to see this as an extreme approach to criminal procedure.

O’Dwyer also wildly claimed that “the Establishment” had acted to squelch the case. Who, exactly, constituted this “Establishment”? After all, at a local level, most people would consider the D.A. (in this instance, Nifong), the city’s newspaper (in this instance, the Herald-Sun), and the city’s largest university and employer (in this case, Duke) to constitute “the Establishment.” Yet in the lacrosse case, the prosecutor broke myriad rules to keep Mangum’s case alive, the local newspaper did everything possible to rationalize Nifong’s behavior, and the local university’s administration and outspoken faculty members bent over backwards to portray their students in the worst possible light. Meanwhile, at the national level, I would assume nearly everyone would consider the New York Times as the manifestation of the “Establishment” media—and the Times aggressively framed the case in the most favorable light possible toward Nifong, most spectacularly through the error-laden article upon which O’Dwyer placed such reliance.

But, nonetheless, in O’Dwyer’s imagined version of reality, “the Establishment” was on the side of the falsely accused lacrosse players.

No revelations from the civil suit likely could ever sway someone like O’Dwyer. And, in fairness, most people, including most who didn’t follow the case closely, accepted the findings of the AG’s investigation. But there will always be a small percentage of society, as seen in the O’Dwyer post, that decline to live in the reality-based community, or that cling to bizarre conspiracy theories—showing the continuing harm that the misconduct of Nifong, DNA Security, and the Durham Police caused to the falsely accused players. And, for good or ill, it’s through a civil suit that the falsely accused players (and their unindicted teammates) can receive some compensation from those whose misconduct harmed them.

A Curious Comment

This anonymous item, from the common thread: "Robert King Steel (Board Chair of Trustees in 2006) has been heard in and around Greenwich, Connecticut of late, claiming 'he knows something happened in the house that night.'"

If true, the ex-Board chairman's remarks could be considered a breach of the falsely accused players' settlement with Duke. But, of course, this is nothing more than an anonymous comment. I tried to reach Steel for a comment, but his office indicates availability only through the first-class mail.

Accordingly, I'm urging the person who left the comment to contact me directly, at kcjohnson9@gmail.com.

The AHA's Shame

[Update, 3 Jan. 2011, 3.32pm: From the comments section, I completely agree with Bill Anderson's observation: "The thing to remember here is that a number of the worst academic offenders in this case have received rewards afterward. Some faculty members have been promoted to deans, others have been given high-profile promotions or have been hired away by 'elite' universities, and Wood now has a prestigious award.

"This is not an accident. This is how the 'elites' at the top of the academic food chain see things. They really wanted these young men to go to prison simply because of who they were, as to a person these faculty members knew there was no rape or assault.

"Why anyone would send their children to sit under people like this, I never will know. I hope I never am guilty as a faculty member of showing such contempt toward my own students."]

I have a piece at Minding the Campus on the latest embarrassment to academia that the lacrosse case has produced--the American Historical Association conferred upon Peter Wood (yes, that Peter Wood) the Eugene Asher Award, given annually to one history teacher for having "inspired" his or her students.

That would be the same Peter Wood who repeatedly, and publicly, maligned students from his classes. I'm not sure why the AHA considered such behavior to be acceptable for an Asher Award winner, though I'm sure DIW readers can offer some informed speculation.

Quote for the Day

Early on, Easley’s attorneys had asked Kenerly for a chance to speak with him before he made any final decision on how to proceed in the case.

Kenerly agreed to make himself available, mainly because he didn’t want to miss something that could be crucial.

“I didn’t want to make a Mike Nifong mistake,” Kenerly says, referring to the former Durham County DA’s handling of the Duke University lacrosse case.

--from a Salisbury Post profile about retiring DA Bill Kenerly's handling of the Mike Easley case

Of all of the disgraced Mike Nifong's ethical misdeeds (lying to the court, withholding exculpatory DNA evidence, making improper public statements, ordering the police to violate their own procedures and instead run a suspects-only lineup), perhaps the most inexplicable was his refusal (on three separate occasions) to meet with defense attorneys who said they possessed evidence of their clients' innocence. It's hard to come up with an innocent explanation for that Nifong maneuver--because, of course, there isn't one.

So it's good to see that, at the very least, Nifong is remembered as an example of grossly unethical conduct for all high-profile prosecutors to avoid.

The Durham Way

Final thoughts on the last few weeks:

Given all that we’ve seen of Durham’s attitudes toward criminal justice—reflected best in the nomination and then election of Mike Nifong, followed by the nomination and election of his deputy, Tracey Cline—the verdict in the case should come as little surprise. True, false accuser Crystal Mangum didn’t deny that she had set the fire in her house’s bathroom. And, also true, the jury saw a contemporaneous video of her confessing to setting the fire. But this is the same city in which a near-majority of voters appeared unconvinced by a videotape showing Reade Seligmann someplace else at the time Mike Nifong claimed he committed a horrific crime. In Durham, it seems, normal laws of space and time don’t apply—or at least a lot of the residents wish it could be so, when it would serve their ideological interests.

(1) Even given this environment, I was surprised by the post-trial comments of the Mangum case judge, Abe Jones. After seeing Mangum convicted on a misdemeanor count of child abuse, Jones lifted a previous court order and allowed Mangum to regain custody of her three children. The false accuser, he suggested, was a good mother, and the fire-setting incident was an exception in her treatment of her children.

Whatever investigation North Carolina children’s services conducted of Mangum remains confidential. But considerable documentation—spread across four years—casts considerable doubt about Mangum’s fitness as a mother. The lacrosse case file included contemporaneous documents (such as statements from Mangum and her “drivers”) that detailed a woman who spent late nights on “dates” in hotel rooms and most of the time left her children with her parents and, on one occasion, her “driver.” The AG’s report indicated that Mangum showed up to one 2007 interview behaving erratically and testing positive for (among other drugs) methadone, a drug frequently proscribed for patients with heroin addictions. And in 2010, Mangum’s own attorney admitted that her client set clothes in the bathroom on fire (with her kids down the hall) and then didn’t tell police officers what she had done, even as her kids remained in the house.

While reasonable people can disagree over whether the record outlined above would justify a loss of custody, surely few would suggest that the clothes-burning incident was an exception in Mangum’s parenting skills. But, then again, in North Carolina, judges are elected, and Judge Jones has to face the same electorate that voted into office first Mike Nifong and then Tracey Cline.

(2) It was interesting to see who in Durham rose to Mangum’s defense—or who defended her defenders—and who took a pass on the case. Foremost, of course, in the latter category was the Group of 88. Though each and every member of the Group remains on record as publicly affirming that something “happened” to Mangum the night of the lacrosse party, and though each and every member of the Group remains publicly committed to “turn up the volume no matter what the police say or the court decides,” it appears as if no Group member gave a public statement sympathizing with Mangum or contributed to her legal defense fund. Unlike the lacrosse case, in this matter the Group saw no advantage in exploiting Mangum’s position.

Also quiet was the Durham professional Left. The leadership of the People’s Alliance, the “progressive” PAC whose voters did so much to ensure first Nifong’s and then Cline’s victory, shied away from defending Mangum. Even as they did so, however, the group’s spokesperson, Milo Pyne, announced his continued “sympathy” for Nifong, making Durham perhaps the only city in the country where left-wing activists express sympathy for a figure who committed massive prosecutorial misconduct in trying to send innocent people to jail.

Today’s news suggests that indifference to prosecutorial misconduct extends beyond the Group of 88 and the People’s Alliance, to the very core of Durham’s “minister of justice.” DA Tracey Cline—Nifong’s would-be second chair if the lacrosse case went to trial—has dismissed ADA Mitchell Garrell, after previously cutting his pay. Garrell, it’s worth remembering, had opposed Cline in the four-way 2008 race for the DA’s nomination, when he ran on a campaign calling for the “minister of justice” to behave ethically. According to the N&O, his dismissal occurred after he behaved ethically—he turned over, as he should have, all case-related material to the defense in the case of Derrick Allen. Unfortunately for Garrell, these files included material suggesting that “Minister of Justice” Cline had misled the court.

[In 2008, Cline was nominated courtesy of the “Nifong coalition” (which gave Nifong his victory first in the 2006 primary and then the general election)—Durham’s “progressive” whites, plus most African-Americans.]

(3) Silence from the Group and the PA left defense of Mangum to a motley crew of professional race-baiters—figures like Durham’s most prominent homophobe, Victoria Peterson; ex-school board member Jackie Wagstaff, whose courtroom behavior yielded her a 10-day sentence for contempt; and Steven Matherly, a PA “activist” who told the N&O that he considered his own previous brushes with the law a “badge of honor.”

Matherly repeatedly made the . . . peculiar . . . assertion that the attorney general (the state’s chief law enforcement officer) lacks the power to declare innocent people in his state who are falsely accused. He supplemented this legal “analysis” with a wild claim that those who did Ms. Magnum wrong (including, as he referenced in one post, the behavior of the lacrosse players) created a Durham environment, 2006-2010, that resembled the anti-black South of the 1920s and 1930s, in which lynchings occurred. Those looking to Matherly, however, for the 1920s/1930s Southern equivalents of Mike Nifong (a prosecutor who violated rules to keep alive a criminal claim from an African-American) or the Group of 88 (members of the local Establishment who tied their professional prestige to a criminal claim from an African-American) would still be waiting. I doubt that Matherly will provide any such examples in the future.

Given Matherly’s ignorance of both legal procedure and history, defending him is no easy task. But into the breach stepped Duke professor Robert Zimmerman, a prominent apologist for the Group of 88. Prof. Zimmerman, who in 2007 spent months hinting that he possessed secret evidence that would show the Group of 88’s statement wasn’t about the lacrosse case (ultimately, he produced no such evidence), made a surprise re-appearance in the DIW comment thread. His entertaining submissions featured his usual combination of a (as one commenter noticed) “passive-aggressive” attitude with Amelia Bedelia-style textual analysis.

(4) As the nation’s highest-profile false rape accuser faced trial on unrelated charges, two other blows challenged the ultra-feminist claim that women never lie about rape. In New York City, weather reporter Heidi Jones was charged with filing a false claim of rape after she gave police an inconsistency-riddled tale of a mysterious Hispanic man first raping her and threatening her. And in Sweden, even Wendy Murphy (“I never, ever met a false rape claim") expressed doubt about sexual assault charges against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

(5) Finally, in a classic example of how the academy’s lack of accountability has broader effects, Mangum’s legal proceedings coincided with the nomination of Group of 88’er Cathy Davidson to a position on the NEH’s advisory board. That would be the same Cathy Davidson, it’s worth reiterating, who published a January 2007 op-ed that was either lying or delusional in its description of the March 2006 environment at Duke.

Times Sports Editor Reassigned; Mangum Trial Updates

[Update, Friday, 9.19pm: Mangum's five misdemeanor convictions included child abuse. And yet, reports Emery Delasio of the AP, Mangum "was allowed to regain custody of her children, who have been in the care of a friend since a different judge decided last summer Mangum was violating visitation terms."

[Update, 5.13pm: Race-baiter Jackie Wagstaff was sentenced to 10 days in jail for contempt. The Mangum jury deadlocked, 9-3, on the felony arson charge (the charge for which the jury was shown a video of Mangum describing how she started the fire). A mistrial resulted; a retrial seems highly unlikely. It would be interesting to know the backgrounds of the jurors who found Mangum not guilty.]

[Update, 3.30pm, Friday: Durham resident race-baiter Jackie Wagstaff is facing the possibility of contempt charges for muttering "this is ridiculous" as the judge gave additional instructions to the Mangum jury.]

[Update, 1.25pm, Friday: Via the Milliken twitter feed: the jury is on a lunch break. It has decided on four of the counts, but remains divided, 8-4, on the arson charge, despite having witnessed a video in which Mangum admitted she set clothes on fire in her bathroom.]

The New York Post reports that Tom Jolly, the Times sports editor who oversaw the paper's disgraced early coverage of the lacrosse case--for which he subsequently apologized--has been reassigned. The Times did not name a replacement. Fittingly, the Post lists the paper's mishandling of the lacrosse case as item number one in Jolly's legacy.

And, as I noted below, one of my classes has an exam this afternoon, and so I will be off-line most of the afternoon; Matthew Milliken is back in court covering the Mangum trial, and you can follow his twitter feed.

The Mangum Trial Continues [with updates]

[Update, Thurs., 11.58am: One of my classes has an exam this afternoon, and so I will be off-line most of the afternoon; Matthew Milliken is back in court, and you can follow his twitter feed.]

[Update, Thurs., 10.17am: The Mangum case has gone to the jury. And here's a remarkable update from the twitter feed of H-S reporter Matthew Milliken, who covered the trial yesterday: "Jackie Wagstaff [a race-baiting former school board member, and outspoken Nifong supporter] overheard during recess: 'They are not understanding the nature of the black household.' Not sure if she's referring to [the racially-mixed] jury." Only in Durham could we get the insinuation that a mother burning clothes in a room near to where her children were sleeping is part of the "nature of the black household."]

[Update, Wed., 9.40am: The N&O reports: "In a videotaped interrogation shown to the jury Tuesday morning, Crystal Mangum confessed to smashing her boyfriend Milton Walker’s windshield with a vacuum cleaner, slashing his tires and setting his clothes on fire because she says he punched her in the face repeatedly." Mangum's attorney tried and failed to get the confession excluded from evidence, on grounds that at the time, the false accuser "was medicated after a spinal tap for headache treatment and hadn’t gotten much sleep the previous two nights."]

The first week of the Crystal Mangum trial (on charges of arson, injury to personal property, contributing to the delinquency of her three children, and resisting arrest) has concluded in Durham. The trial raises one obvious question: namely, what criteria the North Carolina children’s services department possibly could have used to keep Mangum’s three children in the same house with her, given that the record of the lacrosse case proved that she either was a monster, willing to lie and send innocent people to jail for decades, or a person so mentally disturbed that she believed her lies. It’s perfectly clear from the record of the trial that the children were not well-served by remaining in Mangum’s custody.

A few items:

(1) A courtroom observer passes on news that upon her arrest, Mangum (falsely) told officers that she was pregnant. She also, of course, lied to the officers about her identity.

(2) Mangum’s intriguing defense amounts to a version of entrapment: (a) that police officers, having received a desperate 911 call from one of Mangum’s children, should have trusted the assurances of this mentally imbalanced woman that everything was OK, and not entered the premises; and (b) that, having been arrested, Mangum had no obligation to inform police officers that she had set clothes on fire in the bathroom, even as her three children were in a nearby room.

(3) For those desiring a peek inside the pro-Mangum fantasy world, Steve Matherly is attending the trial. In a recent post, the People’s Alliance “activist” has taken a break from defending Mangum, and instead has launched into the character attacks on the lacrosse players that were so common from figures like Cathy Davidson and her Group of 88 comrades. Matherly made the mindboggling claim that the role of the lacrosse players in the lacrosse case is comparable to “the racist riots of the 1920s and 30s.”

Yes, because as any student of U.S. history knows, in the 1920s and 1930s, local prosecutors throughout the South were—like Mike Nifong in the lacrosse case—willing to violate myriad ethical procedures in order to imprison innocent white people, despite baseless charges from a local African-American woman.

Astonishing

Astonishing news from the Duke public relations office: Group of 88 member—and later apologist—Cathy Davidson has been nominated to the 26-member the National Council of Humanities, which advises the NEH. The position requires Senate confirmation; I would hope that at least one senator would ask Davidson about her record in the lacrosse case—both her rush to judgment in spring 2006 and her willful dissembling about her actions in January 2007.

To review Davidson’s record:

On April 6, 2006—based solely on information about the case supplied by the media and rogue prosecutor Mike Nifong—she and 87 colleagues signed the “Group of 88” statement. The guilt-presuming document publicly affirmed that something “happened” to (false) accuser Crystal Mangum.

The signatories also appeared to express indifference to any evidence that might contradict their race/class/gender-dominated vision, announcing that they would be “turning up the volume” regardless of “what the police say or the court decides.”

And, in perhaps the statement’s most stunning passage, Davidson and her colleagues publicly thanked campus protesters for two things: “for not waiting and for making yourselves heard.” At the time of the statement, the two highest-profile campus protests were a March 26, 2006 protest in front of the lacrosse captains’ house at which protesters carried banners proclaiming “CASTRATE” and a March 29, 2006 “Take Back the Night” event at which protesters blanketed the campus with a wanted poster containing the lacrosse players’ photos.

Neither Davidson nor any other Group member ever explained why they thanked the protesters “for not waiting.” Many months later, Davidson and a few other Duke faculty bizarrely claimed that when they thanked protesters “for making yourselves heard” they were referring not to the two highest-profile anti-lacrosse protests but to other anti-lacrosse protests occurring on campus at the time. No contemporaneous evidence exists to sustain this claim.

As the months passed, the sexual assault case to which Davidson and her like-minded colleagues collapsed. And as it did, the Group came under increasing criticism from the media, from Duke alumni, and from some Duke students.

In response, Davidson took to the pages of the Raleigh News & Observer on January 5, 2007, to offer an apologia for the Group’s actions. As she conceded in a mass e-mail, she wrote the column after consulting with an attorney and being informed that she and her colleagues could be vulnerable to a lawsuit from the lacrosse players.

Rather than apologizing for her rush to judgment, Davidson’s essay combined self-pitying passages regarding criticism of her and other Duke faculty from “blog hooligans” with continued character assaults on the “sleazy” lacrosse players and a ringing defense of Crystal Mangum. Davidson chastised those who labeled Mangum a liar (as, by this point, had been clearly established), and instead mused, “Who is that exotic dancer? A single mother who takes off her clothes for hire partly to pay for tuition at a distinguished historically black college. Of course the lacrosse story makes Americans of conscience cringe.”

Perhaps most troubling for the qualifications of her soon-to-be position, however, was Davidson’s description of spring 2006 events on campus. Her January 2007 claims demonstrated a tendency for either outright fabrication or existence in a cocooned world in which no alternative narratives ever penetrated. Neither characteristic would serve the NEH well.

Davidson unconvincingly denied that the Group’s statement—which affirmed that something happened to Mangum and thanked protesters who had labeled the lacrosse players rapists—presumed guilt. She then invented an alternative reality in which the statement provided a needed corrective to a late March 2006 media environment in which black Duke students were being attacked by racist “insults” from fellow Duke students and in which most on campus and in the media were defending the lacrosse players, elevating them “to the status of martyrs, innocent victims of reverse racism.”

Needless to say, no evidence exists for either of these descriptions; at the time, nearly all articles on the case either were neutral (if critical of the lacrosse players’ character) or presumed guilt. And the administration of Duke president Richard Brodhead went out of its way to meet with (some would say appease) black student groups on campus. Racially charged events certainly existed—Group of 88’er Houston Baker’s screed against the white lacrosse players, black Duke students surrounding lacrosse player Bo Carrington on the campus quad demanding that he turn in the rapists—but these were events in which African-Americans, not whites on campus, were in the wrong.

After ringing defenses of herself, her colleagues, and Crystal Mangum, Davidson’s January 2007 essay concluded with milquetoast statements that Nifong might have committed prosecutorial misconduct and that she favored “impartial legal proceedings” for the falsely accused lacrosse players.

A major premise of this blog has been a lament that no accountability appears to exist in the academy, that the Group of 88 members suffered no consequences for their actions. Outside of the academy, I have repeatedly implied, behavior such as we witnessed from the Group of 88 would have consequences. With this nomination, it appears as if I erred in that assumption.

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

A coda, featuring Cathy Davidson in her own words:

"I am positive I am not the only professor who was and continues to be adamant about the necessity for fair and impartial legal proceedings for David, Collin and Reade."
--N&O, January 2007

"To the students speaking individually and to the protestors making collective noise, thank you for not waiting and for making yourselves heard."
--Group of 88 statement, April 2006

Imagine if Professor Davidson did not believe in "the necessity for fair and impartial legal proceedings for David, Collin and Reade."

The Mangum Trial

The trial of false accuser Crystal Mangum is underway in Duham; the serial fabricator stands charged with arson, injury to personal property, contributing to the delinquency of her three children, and resisting arrest.

A few items: (1) Prosecutors agreed that they wouldn’t bring up Mangum’s myriad lies in the lacrosse case to undermine the credibility of her tales regarding the criminal charges against her.

(2) In the seating of the jury, Mangum’s attorney seemed determined to use preemptive challenges against people tied to Duke, especially Duke students. I can see where Duke students wouldn’t be likely to ignore the evidence to bolster Mangum’s position, but I’m not sure about Duke employees or administrators. Certainly, the false accuser would have been incredibly lucky if one of the Group of 88 had somehow slipped through to the jury.

Reported the N&O, Mangum’s attorney asked the judge “to release the eighth juror interviewed because his family has strong ties to Duke and his wife, a university employee, sat on a committee charged with helping the campus deal with the lacrosse scandal.

The mentioned committee was presumably the Campus Culture Initiative—a body dominated by the Group of 88 and its allies. It would seem that this juror would be ideal for the false accuser.

(3) The pro-Mangum People’s Alliance activist Steve Matherly has a blog that gives the party line on the trial from Durham’s extreme left. Matherly has posts complaining about the prosecutor’s issuing preemptive challenge to jurors who seemed disinclined to value circumstantial evidence. But he spends most of his time playing the race card, offering conspiratorial rants about the media’s “racism” in its reporting on Mangum (this is the same “media” that included the Times and the Herald-Sun, which propped up Mangum’s bogus charges for months after it was clear they were false) and wildly demanding that Mangum’s defense attorney be allowed to question every white juror regarding what they “think[] about black folks.”

Intriguingly, Matherly claims that Mangum still possesses considerable “support” at North Carolina Central—which, if true, would be astonishing.

(4) And, one final point worth reiterating; Matherly is a minor player in the People’s Alliance. But Milo Pyne is a significant actor, co-chairing the PA’s PAC and serving as the group’s spokesperson. This is the man, again, who just announced his “sympathy” for Mike Nifong.

I’d be hard pressed to come up with any other case in which local liberal leaders publicly, and repeatedly, sided with the perpetrator of prosecutorial misconduct. In this respect, the actions of figures such as Matherly and Pyne cast an ugly light on the sincerity of “progressives” in Durham.

Sporting Analysis

The lacrosse case featured some . . . unusual . . . sports-related commentary from members of the Group of 88. Karla Holloway produced an essay for Scholar and Feminist Online denouncing the women’s lacrosse team for publicly supporting their falsely accused men’s colleagues. Grant Farred penned a book advancing the preposterous argument that Houston Rockets center Yao Ming constituted “the most profound threat to American empire.”

It turns out that this sort of bizarre perspective on athletics isn’t confined to the Group of 88; like-minded colleagues at other institutions offer similar views. Indeed, the journal Sport in Society is filled with Group of 88-style, race/class/gender analysis of sports-related questions.

Take, for instance, the work of Miami (Ohio) professor Mary McDonald, who describes herself as among the critical sport scholars” who use tools from such fields as women’s studies, ethnic studies, and cultural studies to produce scholarship “concerned with issues of inequality and social justice.” McDonald’s roster of courses includes “Introduction to the History of Activism”; “Critical Perspectives of the Body”; and “Women, Gender Relations & Sport.”

In the August edition of SiS, McDonald (with one of her graduate students) penned an article entitled, “Dressed for success? The NBA's dress code, the workings of whiteness and corporate culture.” The article purports to analyze the 2005 decision by NBA commissioner David Stern to implement a dress-code policy for the league’s players. The move came after a string of bad publicity for the league, most notably an ugly event in Detroit in which former Indiana Pacer Ron Artest went into the stands and brawled with fans.

It doesn’t take a Ph.D. to determine why the NBA adopted its policy. It needed to appease its largely white fan base. Or, in McDonald’s academic jargon: “the dress code helps position the white-dominated ownership structure and its white fan base as necessary arbitrators of ‘appropriate’ moral behaviour.” And given that most employers have the authority to institute dress codes over their employees, McDonald has to concede that the dress code might fall under the heading of “seemingly trivial practices and policies,” even if, she breathlessly notes, “has its own Wikipedia page.”

McDonald explains that despite focusing on a seemingly banal policy, her essay will explicate the alternate meanings, “the broader pedagogical functions at work through the introduction of this policy, that is—to explore the dominant meanings the initiation of this policy conveys and attempts to teach.” And what do these broader pedagogical functions reveal? “Far from a simple policy that requires a particular style of dress we read the NBA dress code critically, demonstrating its relationship to racialized, classed and gendered meanings and attempts at capital accumulation.” Of course.

McDonald’s essay combines academic jargon with a desire to analyze anything and everything through the prism of race, class, and gender. The dress code, she maintains, shows how “the social construction of race legitimates a system of privileges that accrue to bodies racialized as white . . . This perspective additionally acknowledges whiteness both within and beyond the case of the dress code.” McDonald laments that “the dress code represents an example of the NBA's continuing attempts at surveillance and control of its predominately African-American playing force, in this case by promoting conventional styles of dress and expression at the expense of hip-hop styles”—while also representing “an attempt to normalize white middle-class ideologies to legitimate the accumulation of capital.”

Her article’s goal, McDonald continues (impenetrably), is to provide “alternative interpretations linking an everyday cultural practice such as the dress code to normalizing strategies within contemporary neo-liberal capitalist mandates. Stated differently, in recontextualizing the dress code this paper maps out and makes visible the complex processes which both venerate and demonize the athleticism and entertainment value of black masculine bodies, and simultaneously deny the salience of political, social and economic processes that produce discourses of a commercialized white normativity,” all the while seeking “to promote new understandings in the quest for social justice.”

Alas, McDonald laments, the league’s installation of the dress code “additionally directs attention away from the actions and material advantages of white bodies while further perpetuating: ‘a cycle of stigmatization, assimilation and subordination’.”

In this respect, while “seemingly innocent,” the dress code “actually serves as a mechanism which combines with other forms of white cultural capital to safeguard the political and economic interests of whites and the dominant social class,” and so “the dress code can thus be understood as a type of whitewash” even as the NBA’s “black bodies serve as hot commodities in the global marketplace.”

McDonald repeatedly argues that the dress code wanted to distance the NBA and its players from hip-hop culture. During this period, however, the NBA promoted hip-hop artist Jay-Z, who even owned a small share of New Jersey Nets.

How to explain this apparent contradiction in her argument? McDonald notes that “music such as his not only reinforces the racial status quo via essentialistic imagery but additionally helps promote dominant gender ideologies.” In this way, “elements of hip-hop are ideologically aligned with dominant gender relations and images of hypersexuality which are also remade through elite professional sport which continues to promote masculine hegemony.” Indeed, “read from within the context of contemporary capitalist marketing strategies, like those employed by the NBA and promoted in the corporate media, the aesthetic signifiers of hip-hop are increasingly celebrated apart from the very material conditions of inequality that some forms of hip-hop seek to critique.” In other words: hip-hop is an admirable, genuine expression of black culture—except when it’s not.

Even as she admits hip-hop’s sexism and homophobia, however, McDonald can’t quite bring herself to criticize the music. While she concedes that “rap and hip-hop lyrics contain misogynistic and violent overtones,” the real problems are the “censorship campaigns such as those in the 1990s lead by Tipper Gore(!)” (who also ignored the dangers posed by “the US prison-industrial complex”) and other critics who lack a “sophisticated understanding of the corporate and political interests involved in promoting one-dimensional images of street life.” In any event, McDonald muses, “sexism and homophobia . . . are also widely prevalent in almost every other musical form.”

(McDonald regularly employs an “everyone-else-does-it” arguing style. At another point in the essay, she offers the following non-sequitur: she suggests that dress codes as a whole don’t really matter, since “Jeffrey Skillings and Ken Ley regularly wore business suits as they oversaw the corruption promoted by energy corporation Enron, while thousands of Enron employees and shareholders lost thousands of dollars, life savings and pensions upon Enron's collapse.”)

McDonald frames the debate over the dress code—or at least what debate existed—as part “of broader patterns of white racist preoccupation with the allegedly threatening and inferior character of black masculinity, preoccupations that can be traced back to slavery and reconstruction, and which have been frequently used by whites to legitimate the political status quo in relation to black cultural and political inequity.” And the debate goes well beyond the NBA: “the presumption of white superiority continues to fuel and justify racist treatment including the contemporary dismantling of social welfare programs.” As McDonald links the NBA’s policy to programs for society’s neediest, it’s worth remembering that she’s writing about a league in which the average player’s salary is $3.4 million.

The linkage to welfare policy isn’t the only time in which McDonald’s arguments raise questions about whether she exists in an alternate universe. In the late 1970s, the NBA seemed to be on the ropes, in large part because of widespread drug use among the league’s players (a majority of whom were African-American). The NBA’s unsurprising, common-sense response? The league instituted a drug-testing policy, and also launched a marketing campaign portraying the players positively, as embodiments of the American Dream. What should the NBA have done instead, implies McDonald? “[C]onfronting stereotypical notions of blackness promoted to maintain white cultural and political advantages.”

Or take this passage:

The imposition of the dress code can thus be understood as yet the latest attempt at a peculiar form of “diversity management” designed to both manage, but ultimately profit from, stereotypical images of urban black masculinity as immature, uncontrollable, greedy and egotistical Other attempts to control similar connotations include the imposition of a first year player salary cap which limits compensation to rookies and the instigation of an age restriction limiting the league to players aged 19 years or older.

Whatever the merits of the dress-code policy (and, as I noted above, the policy seemed like a no-brainer), any linkage between it and the first-year salary cap or the age-limitation policy seems tenuous at best and non-existent at worst. The first-year salary cap was pretty strictly a financial decision and an issue of older vs. younger players; while the age limit policy was primarily a competition question. Neither policy had much (if anything) to do with the image dilemma that motivated the dress code.

Or take McDonald’s criticism of Commissioner David Stern’s decision to suspend Ron Artest for the season after the Detroit brawl. The commissioner’s response, she contends, “fails to address structural and ideological inequities” between blacks and whites in American society.

After a week in which the NCAA issued the astonishing ruling that a star player’s father demanding bribes to send him to a particular university isn’t grounds for ruling the player ineligible, there’s certainly a need for in-depth, scholarly analysis of sport and society. Alas, the chances of receiving this type of analysis from the contemporary academy are, to put it charitably, remote.

Hat tip: D.B.

Island of Misfit Toys

In what was a horrific midterm election for Democrats, one of the party’s few bright spots came in Nevada, where Senate majority leader Harry Reid won re-election. The result was perhaps the biggest upset of the year: Reid’s favorability ratings were terrible, and Nevada’s economy was worse. Reid won because first, the Republicans nominated an extremist, Sharon Angle; and second, Angle eschewed guidance from national GOP operatives, instead listening to a handful of long-time associates, many of whom had either dubious backgrounds or bizarre beliefs. Knowledgeable Republicans lamented that Angle’s advisors belonged on the “island of misfit toys.”

In today’s N&O, Jesse James Deconto profiles Durham’s own version of the island of misfit toys—those who populate the interlocking committees devoted to defending disgraced rogue prosecutor Mike Nifong and serial false accuser Crystal Mangum.

Most of the committee members are the sort of cranks you’d expect to champion disreputable figures like Mangum and Nifong. Even the Group of 88, after all, has essentially abandoned Mangum, even though each and every member of the Group has never repudiated their guilt-presuming public assertion that something “happened” to Mangum at the lacrosse party.

Deconto tells the story of such activists as Douglas Register, who says he joined the pro-Mangum committee because he, like Mangum, suffers from mental illness. This problem perhaps explains Register’s bizarre analysis of the criminal case against Mangum, which he suggests is a conspiracy to improve the city’s position in the civil case filed by the falsely accused players. (If anything, Mangum’s alleged criminal activity would harm the city’s position, since it would further undermine the credibility of the figure to which the leadership of the Durham Police Department chose to attach their fate.)

And then there’s Durham’s resident race-baiting homophobe, Victoria Peterson, who Deconto observes has repeatedly interrupted the judge in Mangum’s pre-trial hearings. But speaking out of turn is nothing new from Peterson, who was ejected from the Nifong disciplinary hearing and then hijacked a WRAL live shot after her expulsion from the courtroom.

The Nifong and Mangum committees, however, don’t consist solely of cranks. Ideologues also were attracted to the dual causes. Some members, like Myra Kinderknecht, were virtual caricatures. Describing a case in which Mangum’s accuser and the chief prosecutor are black, Kinderknecht hypothesized: “It’s almost like a form of lynching, what’s happened to her. Everything that has happened to her screams white power, black oppression.”

Other committee members, however, represent more mainstream perspectives. Take, for instance, Steven Matherly, a member of the pro-Mangum committee who also belongs to the People’s Alliance, the most left-wing of Durham’s three major political committees.

The Durham political left’s consistent support for Mike Nifong’s crusade—and its turning of a blind eye to the type of police and prosecutorial misconduct left-wing activists usually denounce—is one of the darkest aspects of the entire lacrosse case. The People’s Alliance endorsed Nifong’s 2006 re-election, even though it was clear at that point Nifong had, at the least, charged one innocent person (Reade Seligmann) and violated ethics guidelines regarding pre-trial publicity. In a statement from the time, the Alliance noted, “Our general feeling was that [Nifong] is a person of high integrity and great skill. He’s a tough but fair and honest prosecutor. When you have the State’s power concentrated in one person, you want that person to be thoughtful and sober.” (Thoughtful and sober are two adjectives few objective observers would apply to Mike Nifong.)

Then there was the curious case of city council member Diane Catotti, the PA’s favorite Durham politician. Catotti strongly backed Nifong in 2006, and then did everything in her power first to block and then to undermine an investigation of the Police Department’s handling of the lacrosse case.

And, courtesy of today’s article, now there’s PA spokesman and political action committee co-chair Milo Pyne. Pyne said that he had declined to join either the Mangum or Nifong committees, but added, “I have sympathy for Ms. Mangum and Mr. Nifong.” I e-mailed the People’s Alliance spokesman to ask if he’d care to explain his sympathy for Nifong. As regular DIW readers know, I’m a lifelong Democrat, and I've never considered multi-faceted prosecutorial misconduct compatible with liberal political principles, nor have I ever believed that the perpetrators of such misconduct are deserving of sympathy.

Pyne’s response? “I am not interested in having this discussion with you.”

Durham, it seems, remains the only place in the United States where “progressives” see themselves as defenders of prosecutorial misconduct—at least when the victims of that misconduct are white males.

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.