Credentials

At any elite university or liberal arts college, professors are expected to publish. In most disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, the path to publication usually features books and peer-reviewed articles; in others—such as Economics—peer-reviewed articles and case studies are the preferred options. Math, Engineering, and the natural sciences have quite different sets of scholarly expectations.

Only three members of the 69 tenured or tenure-track members of the Group came from Math or the natural sciences. (None came from Engineering or Economics.) Of the remainder, apart from a scattered few in Music and Dance, all teach in departments where professors are expected to publish books.

In looking through the Group’s c.v.’s, an interesting pattern emerges: sixteen* have published books with Duke University Press.

A couple of prominent anti-lacrosse professors are virtual DUP regulars. Diane Nelson has two forthcoming books with DUP (including The End/s of War: Reckoning and Assumptions of Identity in Post-Genocide Guatemala).

And Duke’s equivalent of Linwood (“The Intimidator”) Wilson, former Women’s Studies Director Robyn (“Language of Lynching“) Weigman, has three edited volumes plus a scholarly monograph with DUP. The “clarifying” professor—who tried and failed to intimidate into silence campus critics of the Group of 88—has written American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender, while her edited volumes include Women’s Studies On Its Own: A Next Wave Reader in Institutional Change.

For the most part, however, a disproportionate number of the DUP-published Group members are professors without books published elsewhere. The DUP book thus was or is a critical credential for the candidate’s recruitment to,* continued employment at, or promotion at Duke. This list includes:

• Ranjanna Khanna (English): 1 book, Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism. Duke University Press, 2003.

• Priscilla Wald (English): 1 book, Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form. Duke University Press, 1995.

• Maurice Wallace (English): 1 book, Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideology in African American Men's Literature and Culture, 1775-1995. Duke University Press, 2002.

• Alberto Moreiras (Literature): 1 book in English, The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies. Duke University Press, 2001.

• Antonio Viego (Literature): 1 book, forthcoming, Ruining Ethnicity and Race: Latino/a Studies, Psychoanalysis and Ego Psychology. Duke University Press, forthcoming 2007.

• Esther Gabara (Romance Studies), 1 book, forthcoming, The Ethos of Modernism: Photographic Aesthetics in Mexico and Brazil. Duke University Press, forthcoming (no publication date listed).

• Ralph Litzinger (Cultural Anthropology): 1 book, Other Chinas: The Yao and the Politics of National Belonging. Duke University Press, 2000.

• Rebecca Stein (Cultural Anthropology), 1 scholarly monograph, Itineraries in Conflict: The Political Life of Tourism in Israel and the Middle East. Duke University Press, forthcoming, (no publication date listed).

It’s not hard to miss the pedagogical slant of the list above. The website of the press states that DUP “publishes primarily in the humanities and social sciences and . . . is best known for its publications in the broad and interdisciplinary area of theory and history of cultural production, and it is known in general as a publisher willing to take chances with nontraditional and interdisciplinary publications.” But while the site lists the press editors, it does not contain a listing of the Editorial Advisory Board—which is composed of Duke professors, and which has the ultimate authority to render decisions on whether or not to publish a manuscript.

Because of the difficulty of gathering public information on the DUP EAB, I sent an email to Prof E. Roy Weintraub (Economics Department) since I recalled from his c.v. that he had served on that board. He said that he would not offer me his personal opinions on it or its members, but that specific factual information should be publicly available, since the Duke Faculty had in the past voted its support of the Press through the Academic Council. (A note on “interest”: Weintraub co-edits a book series on Science and Cultural Theory for DUP, and thus has many dealings with the editors of the Press. His last book was published by DUP, as were his three edited volumes in the History of Political Economy Conference series.)

I asked Professor Weintraub several questions, and he has permitted me to reproduce those questions and his answers:

Q. How is Duke Press organized?

A. It is a university unit reporting to the Provost, and is charged to support the university’s scholarly mission on a financial “break-even” basis. It is set up in two divisions, Books and Journals. Given the cost allocations, and the separate revenue streams to each, the Journals division is, per agreement with the Provost, a cross-subsidizer of the Books division.

Q. What is the reputation of the Books division?

A. It appears that among humanities scholars, and other university presses, it is quite high, and is regarded as fostering and supporting “cutting edge” work in the new humanities areas related to Cultural Studies, widely understood.

Q. What is the role of the Editorial Advisory Board (EAB)?

A. The EAB is a group of Duke University faculty who are selected by the Provost on the recommendation of the Editor of the Press to advise the (Book division) editors on projects, manuscripts, and other matters that the Editor brings to it from time to time.

Q. How does it work?

A. It meets monthly. The editors, in my time on it (1998-2003), provided pre-meeting copies of materials on the projects requiring advice/approval at the monthly meeting. Packets included referee reports, author’s responses, editor’s letters to the authors, tables of contents, c.v.’s of authors, chapter outlines, sample chapters, etc. Packets usually ran 50-100 pages per project, and each month there were ten or more projects to discuss. The editors asked the EAB for its views on each project, its author’s and reviewers’ reputations, and current “action” in the field of the author’s research, as well as suggestions for the editors and the authors, marketing advice to the Press, etc. Since all the Book division editors were present at the meetings, it was a way for the scholars and the book people to learn from each other.

Q. Who was on the EAB?

A. I recall serving at perhaps different times with Jan Radway, Fred Jamison, Priscilla Wald, Orin Starn, Anne Allison, Bruce Lawrence, Wahneema Lubiano, Patricia Leighton, Walter Mignolo, Stanley Hauerwas, Srivanas Aravamudan, and Houston Baker as well as the University Librarian at the time, David Ferriero. I am sure I am forgetting some people, though.

Indeed, Lubiano, for one, lists on her c.v. her DUP Editorial Advisory Board experience—creating the extraordinary situation of a professor who had herself not published a scholarly manuscript being put in a position to pass judgment on the manuscripts of others. It doesn’t take a Ph.D. to determine that such an arrangement is highly problematic. (Lubiano has, at times, listed as a DUP publication one of her “perpetually forthcoming” offerings, Like Being Mugged by a Metaphor: “Deep Cover” and Other “Black” Fictions.)

Beyond Lubiano, the list of past EAB members includes Group members Jan Radway, Priscilla Wald, Anne Allison, Patricia Leighton, Walter Mignolo, Srivanas Aravamudan, and Houston Baker—along with anti-lacrosse extremist Orin Starn and Bruce Lawrence, husband of and co-author with Group member miriam cooke.

In short, it appears that—in the recent past, at least—the DUP has had an Editorial Advisory Board dominated by Group members or their sympathizers, which in turn has recommended publication of manuscripts produced by . . . Group members or their sympathizers on the faculty. And these manuscripts, in turn, have been vital to the continued employment at Duke of . . . Group members or their sympathizers.

*--modified from 14, error on my part ; added the Wald item more purposes of clarity.

Durham Statement

Here is the official statement from the City of Durham on the potential lawsuit:

The City of Durham’s Attorney’s Office has been contacted by phone by attorneys retained by the three players to represent them in a pending lawsuit. In a subsequent letter, the attorneys requested that the City retain all documents and communications that may have any relevance to the case. In response to that request, the City Attorney’s Office notified relevant personnel of the need to preserve any and all communications, which is standard procedure when there is a possibility of litigation.

As required when the City receives a claim or an actual legal complaint, the City notified its excess insurance carrier, the Insurance Company of the State of Pennsylvania. The City has since received written notification from the carrier confirming receipt of the notification of a claim stemming from the Duke Lacrosse investigation. In that communication, the excess carrier further reminded the City of its contractual duties to cooperate under the provisions of the policy, which would include not engaging in activities that might compromise a subsequent defense of an action against the City.

Based on that recommendation, the activities of the Committee to Investigate Durham Police Department in the Duke Lacrosse Case are in a “holding pattern” until after City Attorneys meet with the former lacrosse players’ attorneys on September 5. On September 6, City attorneys will provide a follow up briefing for city council members in a special closed session meeting.

Whichard Committee in Jeopardy?

ABC-11's Tamara Gibbs is reporting that a threat from the city's insurer to terminate the policy might lead to the suspension of the Whichard Committee, which was charged with investigating the DPD's mishandling of the lacrosse case.

Gibbs:

Sources tell Eyewitness News the insurance company, which would pay for a potential lawsuit settlement, threatened to suspend the city's policy if it didn't reconsider the Duke Lacrosse Investigative Committee. We're told the company sent its request by fax last Thursday. The city's policy would cover up to $5 million in the event of a lawsuit.

Of course, had the committee's inquiry not moved at such a glacial pace, this threat would be irrelevant.

Group Profile: William Chafe

[The final installation of a Monday series profiling Group of 88 members, which has included posts on miriam cooke, Diane Nelson, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Wahneema Lubiano, Pete Sigal, Grant Farred, Sally Deutsch, Joseph Harris, Paula McClain, Jocelyn Olcott, Irene Silverblatt, Rebecca Stein, Maurice Wallace, Antonio Viego, and Kathy Rudy. The posts examine the scholarship and teaching of Group members, delving into the mindset of professors who last spring abandoned both the tenets of Duke’s Faculty Handbook and the academy’s traditional fidelity to due process. An item to keep in mind: in higher education, professors control the hiring process. The people profiled in this series will craft future job descriptions for Duke professors; and then, for positions assigned to their departments, select new hires.]

William Chafe is Alice Mary Baldwin Professor of History, where his scholarship, as his website states, “reflects his long-term interest in issue of race and gender equality.” He specializes in U.S. history after World War II, with a particular focus on African-Americans, women, or radical whites.

Unlike many in the Group of 88, Chafe has published widely. And unlike most Group members, several of Chafe’s books have received widespread attention and praise. His website states that his most important book “helped to re-orient scholarship on civil rights toward social history and community studies”—but, unlike so much of the rhetoric that’s come from the Group, the statement isn’t a boast. Civilities and Civil Rights, a study of the Greensboro sit-ins, has been widely used in college courses for the past quarter-century.

Chafe penned a second prize-winning book in his biography of Allard Lowenstein, Never Stop Running. The book is clearly a sympathetic portrayal of Lowenstein—the longtime liberal activist best-known for his role in jumpstarting the dump-Johnson movement of 1968—but is also exhaustively researched, and framed Lowenstein as part of broader political and intellectual developments of the 1960s and 1970s. David Oshinsky termed the book “both a superb biography of Lowenstein and a gripping history of liberal protest and reform in an increasingly conservative age.”

It’s hard to believe that someone who authored two such high-quality books could have taken such a closed-minded approach to events in Durham over the past 17 months.

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But Chafe’s influence on Duke has extended beyond his scholarship or (occasional, for the past 15 years) teaching. From 1995 through 2004, Chafe served as dean of Arts and Sciences faculty, a position that, among other responsibilities, authorizes faculty searches for each department.

In a 2002 address, he explained his strategy to faculty personnel matters: “There has remained a tendency to think of Duke as a place of wealth, whiteness and privilege. We aim to change that.” The Chronicle added that “Chafe said faculty diversity is still lacking, and that the University must continue to seek new ways to attract women and minorities.”

It’s worth remembering that Chafe wasn’t exactly speaking of 1950s Ole Miss in these remarks. Events of the past 17 months provide scant evidence that the Duke faculty is filled with professors determined to do everything they can to prevent the employment of women or minorities at their institution.

Chafe’s policies drew strong praise from the expected quarters. His associate dean, future Group stalwart Karla Holloway, gushed later that Chafe “managed, urged and encouraged institutional change around the issues of diversity.” (The diversity of which Holloway spoke, of course, did not include intellectual or pedagogical diversity, in which neither she nor Chafe have shown any interest.) “He has understood—both politically and ethically—the complexity of this objective, and has worked consistently to make it a substantive fact of our lives at Duke, rather than simply an ‘issue.’” (This ethics-based endorsement came from a person who displayed her own ethics as she wrote about the lacrosse case “white innocence means black guilt,” or when she passed along, though a mass e-mail, fifth-hand scurrilous gossip about the lacrosse players.)

Elite schools normally have placed academic excellence, not “diversity,” as their primary goal in hiring, as Economics professor Roy Weintraub pointed out at the time. “Any college has a limited resource,” Weintraub explained, “of not only money but administrative energy. Duke’s Arts and Sciences has, with the president’s and Board of Trustees’ direction, chosen to spend its money and energy on increasing diversity. There is, of course, an alternative choice seen in the past to be appropriate for the unique institution that is a university and that is the development of an ever-more distinguished faculty . . . Duke makes choices at the margin in every resource allocation decision and every programmatic expenditure. Have we chosen to settle for using our resources to achieve a more diverse faculty instead of a more intellectually distinguished one? The record of the past decade seems to indicate that the answer is ‘yes.’”

Chafe dismissed the concern, glibly suggesting that “diversity enhances our quality rather than diminishes it.” But Chafe—like extreme “diversity” advocates more generally—eluded Weintraub’s point. John Staddon, James B. Duke Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences, observed at the time that the “argument against selecting for diversity is an example of a more general principle: Even if ability is equally distributed, if you limit your search you will often fail to hire the best person available.”

Critics from outside the academy often suggest that “diversity” leads to the hiring and retention of under-qualified minority candidates. There are, of course, a few examples of the pattern among the Group of 88—take, for instance, Wahneema Lubiano (Ph.D. 1987, no scholarly monographs published) or Thavolia Glymph (Ph.D. 1994, no scholarly monographs published). Duke also has a highly unusual policy requiring the provost, “in the event the AP&T Committee’s recommendation is negative . . . to determine whether all factors relating to the merit and value of the candidate, including ethnic, racial, and gender diversity, have been fully and adequately considered.” [emphasis added]

That said, it’s illegal to openly restrict the applicant pool by advertising that no white males (or, in some cases, white females as well) need apply. And, in most cases, it’s also illegal to discriminate on the basis of gender and (usually) race in the hiring process itself.

Yet, as Staddon noted, another path exists for diversity zealots to achieve their goal: “redefine excellence. Some might argue that an excellent physicist is not just someone good at physics but someone whose other attributes—region, gender, race—satisfy some non-physics criterion. ‘Excellence,’ in this new definition, represents a balance between these two sets of criteria.”

“Diversity” also can be achieved by reconfiguring the likely pool of applicants. For instance, a “diversity” dean committed to bringing aboard a gay Chicano male professor understands that he is more likely to do so by approving a new position in gay Chicano literature than one in biochemistry—because the applicant pool for the former field will likely contain a disproportionate share of gay Chicano males, while the applicant pool for the latter field is likely to contain about the same percentage of gay Chicano males as exist in the population as a whole.

And if a “diversity” dean wants more African-American female professors, he more likely can achieve his goal through green-lighting new positions in African-American cultural studies than by granting the Economics Department a new line to hire a specialist in high finance—again because the applicant pool for the former slot will likely contain a disproportionate share of African-American females, while the applicant pool for the latter field is likely to contain about the same percentage of African-American females as exist in the population as a whole.

But, of course, Duke (like all universities) has limited resources. For every new position created to advance a “diversity” agenda—almost always a race/class/gender-oriented professorship in humanities or a few social sciences departments—another faculty position will not be funded, even those justified by the more traditional rationale of hiring for curricular need or to replace distinguished professors who have left or retired. The (perhaps unintended) result? Over time, faculty culture dramatically changes, and the University comes to house a disproportionate number of professors whose fields reflect a belief that the United States, and Western society as a whole, is deeply oppressive on grounds of race, class, and gender.

Or, in other words, just the kind of faculty members willing to set aside the academy’s traditional fidelity to due process (to say nothing of professors’ usual caring for the well-being of their own students) and see in the wild allegations of Crystal Mangum and Mike Nifong—claims that white, male, elite athletes had sexually and verbally victimized a poor, black, female mother—a validation of the beliefs upon which their intellectual careers had been built.

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This certainly is how Chafe initially viewed the lacrosse case. But his subsequent behavior “evolved” in such a way that he has never questioned his initial extreme remarks. His path:

1.) March 31, 2006: By this point, the only information known was presented by Mike Nifong and the Nifong-led DPD investigation. But despite the academy’s traditional fidelity to dispassionate evaluation of evidence, the former dean published an inflammatory op-ed in the Chronicle suggesting that the whites who kidnapped, beat, and murdered Emmett Till provided the appropriate historical context for interpreting the lacrosse players’ behavior. In an unintended commentary on the lax intellectual basis of his article, this historian of the civil rights movement misindentified the year of Till’s murder, one of the highest-profile events of the 1950s civil rights struggle. Chafe’s misuse of history in the op-ed certainly raises some questions about whether he has been so cavalier with sources in his scholarly work. While I’ve assigned both Civilities and Never Stop Running in past courses, I could never do so again seeing how Chafe evaluated evidence in the lacrosse case.

2.) May 3, 2006: By this point, the media had reported on both Reade Seligmann’s alibi (including the video of him somewhere else at the time of the “crime”) and Mike Nifong’s ordering the police to violate their own procedures to produce a players-only lineup. Chafe took to the pages of the Chronicle of Higher Education not to apologize for his initial rush to judgment but to condemn those who elected to “hem and haw over the details of what did or did not happen.” Instead, he reasoned, people needed to focus on the party, whose effects he compared to Hurricane Katrina(!) and which proved that Duke needed a policy that “any student group, on or off the campus, that promotes or engages in racial stereotyping is subject to disciplinary action.” Ironically, his own essay violated his proposed policy: he asserted, without qualification, that “a student group at Duke—the lacrosse team . . . hurled racial epithets at black people.” In fact, one player, not the 47 members of “the lacrosse team,” hurled one epithet, in response to a racial taunt from Kim Roberts. Chafe was thus suggesting that Brad Ross (who wasn’t even in Durham the night of the party and about whose character no one, to my knowledge, has ever said anything publicly critical) should have been disciplined solely on the basis of personal behavior by another member of a 47-person student organization to which Ross belonged.

3.) January 17, 2007: Chafe joined 88 colleagues in signing the “clarifying” letter. The document stated, “There have been public calls to the authors to retract the ad or apologize for it . . . We reject all of these.” It also affirmed, “We appreciate the efforts of those who used the attention the incident generated to raise issues of discrimination and violence”—the precise stated aims of the protests organized by the potbangers who carried the “castrate” banner on March 26, 2006; and the “activists” who blanketed the campus with “wanted” posters on March 29, 2006.

4.) February 23, 2007: By this point, Nifong had dropped the rape charge and recused himself from the case after the Bar filed ethics charges. It was clear both that Mangum’s and Nifong’s stories were total fabrications. Chafe’s response, in an op-ed co-signed by five others? It was time to “move forward,” stop talking about the lacrosse case’s lessons, and enact the CCI’s Group of 88 Enrollment Initiative. Michael Gustafson delivered a devastating critique: “I have no choice but to believe that moving forward, to these six faculty members, means take the story DA Nifong chose to tell and then fast-forward to now as if nothing else had happened. I have no choice but to believe that these faculty members, in seeing that the reality of the situation in no way plays into the assumptions of white, male, athlete privilege that our (blessedly former) colleague Houston Baker championed want us to base our thoughts and actions on the narrative created in the first two weeks rather than the realities discovered over the past eleven months.”

5.) April 30, 2007: By this point, all charges had been dismissed and AG Cooper had proclaimed the players innocent victims of a rogue prosecutor. Chafe’s response? To lash out at critics of the Group. “Bloggers who have targeted the ‘Group of 88’,” he informed the Chronicle, were guilty of “sending us e-mails and making phone calls wishing our deaths and calling us ‘Jew b-’ and ‘n-b-’.” When I subsequently asked him to produce evidence that any of the dozen or so “bloggers who have targeted the ‘Group of 88’” had done any such thing, he admitted that he couldn’t substantiate his accusation (which was, it’s worth reiterating, an allegation that an identifiable group of people—“bloggers who have targeted the ‘Group of 88’”—had engaged in criminal activity.) His new rationalization? “There were repeated phone calls and e-mail messages. I never claimed they were from you, but they were concerted.” Alas, his insinuation that the Chronicle misquoted him came up short—since the Chronicle article quoted a Chafe e-mail.

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“Sex and Race.” It was the title of Chafe’s March 31, 2006 lacrosse-players-as-lynchers op-ed. It also could describe the intellectual approaches of the overwhelming majority of Group of 88 members, whose scholarship Dean Chafe so zealously championed.

To return to Chafe’s 2002 address, and his assertion, “There has remained a tendency to think of Duke as a place of wealth, whiteness and privilege. We aim to change that.”

Chafe and his colleagues in the Group of 88 certainly managed to fulfill that goal. Duke is now thought of an institution where dozens of “diversity”-obsessed professors rushed to judgment to advance their personal, pedagogical, and ideological agendas, at the expense of their own students’ well-being, and subsequently refused to apologize for—or even acknowledge—their dubious conduct.

Coleman: Durham Likely Will Settle

Yesterday’s Herald-Sun made public the two sides in the civil suits against Durham. On the one side: two of the nation’s most powerful attorneys, Williams & Connolly’s Brendan Sullivan and Barry Scheck of the Innocence Project. On the other: Durham’s city attorney, the appropriately named Henry Blinder, who certainly appears to have had blinders on as the Police Department ran roughshod over procedures last year. Durham has a $5 million insurance policy to cover liability from civil suits.

Reporter Ray Gronberg asked Jim Coleman to analyze the strength of the falsely accused students’ case: “Clearly, there was wrongdoing. The city needs to assess the extent of it, and decide whether it bears responsibility. My guess is it will conclude it does.”

The move, Coleman noted, came as no surprise: “That was the whole point of why this case was so extraordinary. These were not run-of-the-mill, poor, unconnected people. These are students who could command the very best lawyers in the country.”

Both Coleman and Duke Law professor Erwin Chemerinsky pointed to the city’s likely vulnerability under the Civil Rights Act of 1871, which allows people to sue in federal court over “the deprivation of any rights, privileges or immunities secured by the Constitution.”

Such suits are often confined to rogue police officers, but in this case the 2007 actions of key Durham officials are likely to prove very costly to the city’s long-term financial health. The city’s key area of vulnerability, Coleman noted, is the procedurally tainted April 4, 2006 lineup, in which ex-DA Nifong instructed the police to violate their own procedures and confine the lineup to suspects.

Coleman told Gronberg that the officers “had an independent obligation to handle this thing according to their own polices, and they've pretty much acknowledged they didn't do that. And, obviously, that had some pretty serious consequences. The students wouldn't have been indicted if they didn't run that flawed identification process.”

Indeed, given the decimation of Brian Meehan’s findings in the December 15 hearing, it’s now evident that the results of the flawed ID process constituted the only evidence used to indict the three specific people ultimately targeted.

In the last four months, in depositions before the State Bar and in a public report, the decision to override procedures has been justified, on the record, by:

• City Manager Patrick Baker
• Police Chief Steve Chalmers
• Lt. Mike Ripberger
• Sgt. Mark Gottlieb

In short, the Baker/Chalmers/Ripberger/Gottlieb quartet have made the students’ case for them, by affirming that the decision to override procedures was not the result of a rogue act but instead a calculated decision that the entire leadership of the Police Department backed, either at the time or subsequently. Perhaps Blinder should have taken off his blinders before allowing the quartet to make such statements on the record.

According to Gronberg, “Coleman added that the city could also be liable for false statements impugning the players that police made knowing they were ‘wrong or they were reckless.’”

This claim would seem to place in the crosshairs Cpl. David Addison, who dominated the local media last March with a string of demonstrably false statements about the players’ actions and the evidence in the case.

• “You are looking at one victim brutally raped. If that was someone else’s daughter, child, I don’t think 46 (tests) would be a large enough number to figure out exactly who did it.” (WRAL, March 24)

• “Addison said police approached the lacrosse team with the five-page search warrant on March 16, but that all of the members refused to cooperate with the investigation.” (Herald-Sun, March 25)

• “We’re asking someone from the lacrosse team to step forward . . . We will be relentless in finding out who committed this crime.” (N&O, March 25)

• “Addison said police can’t force samples from anyone they believe to be implicated in a crime. But he said that, in this situation, there was ‘really, really strong physical evidence.’” (Herald-Sun, March 25)

• “We’re not saying that all 46 were involved. But we do know that some of the players inside that house on that evening knew what transpired and we need them to come forward.” (ABC, March 26)

• “Although we have received many calls expressing concerns and anger about this incident, we have not received any calls which will allow us to assist in resolving this case. We are extending our plea for information and help to our Duke family, who are also part of our community.” (WRAL, March 28)

Addison and the DPD have repeatedly refused public comment on why the corporal chose to go public with false or misleading statements.

The bottom line: Durham has no case.

Duff's Anniversary

Today marks the one-year anniversary of Duff Wilson’s egregiously slanted 5600-word New York Times magnum opus.

The article, billed as a major reassessment of the case, used as its spine the “straight-from-memory” Gottlieb report, which the sergeant subsequently admitted was produced months after the fact based on “contemporaneous” notes that were erased from his dry-eraser board. The Times has never acknowledged the flawed basis of its source material.

The article’s thesis: “By disclosing pieces of evidence favorable to the defendants, the defense has created an image of a case heading for the rocks. But an examination of the entire 1,850 pages of evidence gathered by the prosecution in the four months after the accusation yields a more ambiguous picture. It shows that while there are big weaknesses in Mr. Nifong’s case, there is also a body of evidence to support his decision to take the matter to a jury.” As the Attorney General made clear when he dismissed the case and declared the players innocent, Wilson’s conclusion was factually incorrect: there was no “body of evidence to support his decision to take the matter to a jury.”

One year later, the Times’ official version of the case file is that everyone “agreed” that racial slurs were used before 12.04am, or when Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty were at the party.

Its official version of the case file is that Kim Roberts told police that Crystal Mangum was “clearly sober”—a direct quote—when Mangum arrived at the party.

Its official version of the case file is that Kim Roberts told police on March 22 (the date of her statement contradicting all important aspects of Mangum’s story/stories) that Mangum’s allegation was a “crock.”

All three of the above are factually incorrect, unsupported by the discovery file that Duff Wilson purported to review. (Though the article claimed that Wilson had read the entire file, he also made the peculiar request of one defense attorney—the night before the article appeared—for a full copy of the discovery file, supposedly for the purpose of “re-reviewing” it.) All three of the above items have never been corrected by the Times. The paper, apparently, would prefer to leave intact an incorrect record rather than admit that it made factual errors.

Wilson’s article had one other important effect: it unintentionally if dramatically increased the influence of the blogs’ role in the case. In recent weeks, an op-ed by journalism professor Michael Skube touched off a debate about the value of blogs; Skube had “the uneasy sense that the blogosphere is a potpourri of opinion and little more. The opinions are occasionally informed, often tiresomely cranky and never in doubt. Skepticism, restraint, a willingness to suspect judgment and to put oneself in the background -- these would not seem to be a blogger’s trademarks . . . Something larger is needed: the patient sifting of fact, the acknowledgment that assertion is not evidence and, as the best writers understand, the depiction of real life . . . But what lodges in the memory, and sometimes knifes us in the heart, is the fidelity with which a writer observes and tells. The word has lost its luster, but we once called that reporting.” As several prominent bloggers have pointed out, Skube’s op-ed was appallingly researched, almost an embarrassment to journalism.

Good work, proclaimed Skube, “demanded time, thorough fact-checking and verification and, most of all, perseverance. It’s not something one does as a hobby.” Yet if nothing else can be said about the blogosphere’s reaction to the lacrosse case, the better blogs committed themselves to “time, thorough fact-checking and verification and, most of all, perseverance.”

The reaction to Wilson’s story proved the point. The article appeared on the Times website just after midnight, August 25. At 3.20am, Liestoppers posted a remarkably comprehensive critique—one that’s worth rereading. Unlike the Times article, the critique wasn’t rife with factual errors. And, unlike the Times article, the critique has stood the test of time.

The Liestoppers critique—and similar ones published at this blog and elsewhere in the following 48 hours—were possible only because a number of bloggers had committed themselves to “time, thorough fact-checking and verification and, most of all, perseverance” in approaching the case. Wilson’s seemingly Olympian, neutral tone concealed a bias that revealed itself more clearly the more the reader knew the facts of the case.

Perhaps Skube wouldn’t consider the Liestoppers August 25, 2006 post original reporting. I suspect most fair-minded readers would disagree.

Athletic Myths & Realities

For those who might have missed it, the Duke Athletics Department recently issued a comprehensive summary of its activities.

It noted that accomplishments for the 2006-2007 academic year included “a Rhodes Scholar, an NCAA Championship and numerous recognition in the classroom, in the community and in competition.”

As the report noted,

Academically, our student-athletes continue to set the bar for not only other athletic departments around the nation, but other general student populations as well. Our athletes combined to register a cumulative 3.1 grade point average over the past two semesters, and 21 teams had a collective GPA higher than 3.0 during the spring semester. For 18 consecutive years, Duke student-athletes had more members on the ACC Academic Honor Roll than any other league institution

Chas Salmen of the men’s cross country and track and field teams, who organized an Arab-Jewish coalition and won academic and photography prizes, was awarded the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship. The only honoree from Duke this year, Salmen was chosen from among 896 applicants at 340 colleges and universities throughout the country.

In November, the NCAA announced that for the freshman class entering college in 1999-2000, Duke posted the nation’s top student-athlete graduation rate. Duke (91 percent) was joined by Boston College (90) and Northwestern (90) as the only Division I-A schools at or above 90 percent.

The cover letter, from Joe Alleva, observed that over the previous 15 months, “many people exploited the situation and used the media to promote their ideas about the role of athletics at Duke, the financial investment necessary to compete at the Division I level, and whether the school can maintain the balance of being among the elite in both academics and athletics.”

Who, precisely, would these “many people” be?

• Perhaps Orin Starn, who exploited the case as part of his campaign to transform Duke into Haverford.

• Or “clarifying” faculty member Ken Surin, who suggested that he had no athletes in his classes, because “I do not give quizzes . . . I give very hard reading.”

• Or Peter Wood, who chaired the CCI’s “athletics subgroup,” and whose credibility was found wanting by the Coleman Committee.

I don’t expect any responses from Starn, Wood, or Surin to the report. After all, why let facts interfere with the metanarrative?

Hat tip: N.D.

Nifong's Bill from the Bar

The invoice from the ethics hearing is in, and ex-DA Mike Nifong owes the State Bar nearly $9000.

The specifics:

• Nifong's deposition: $2523.05
• Ben Himan's deposition: $1295.00
• Gottlieb/Ripberger depositions: $1105.05
• Linwood Wilson deposition: $865.60

The remaining money comes from the cost of the court reporter for the ethics hearing, plus incidental expenses.

Week in Review

Apologies from those who rushed to judgment in either the media or the academy have been few and far between. But another reporter who has done the right thing is Brian Ettkin of the Albany Times-Union. He recently penned an annual “I-was-wrong-and-you-were-right column.” He led off:

This one bothers me the most, because it mattered the most. It wasn’t whiffing on a game prediction or misjudging a trade or even calling for the firing of a coach who deserved to be defended.

It was my rush to judgment in the Duke lacrosse case.

I called 47 Duke lacrosse players cowards “standing behind team sports’ code of silence—what happens in the locker room stays in the locker room, and what happens after hours stays in the locker room, too ...” for following their lawyers’ counsel and declining to tell police what happened the night an exotic dancer alleged she was gang-raped at a team party.

I wrote they were “shielding teammates when they should be seeking justice” and that “invoking a code of silence ... strongly suggests they want the truth not to be known.”

From the team’s lack of cooperation with police I speciously inferred guilt.

I was naïve. I never imagined the county district attorney would behave unlawfully and be found guilty of fraud, dishonesty, deceit; of stating falsehoods before a judge; of lying about and withholding exculpatory DNA evidence.

I was wrong.

---------

Compare Ettkin’s approach to that of Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Stephen A. Smith. On May 28, 2006, in the Inquirer, Smith penned a column entitled, “It’s a Case of Dumb and Dumber at Duke.” The targets of his criticism? The women’s lacrosse players, who wore armbands sympathizing with the three targets of Mike Nifong’s unethical behavior—an action that was courageous at the time and that subsequent developments would wholly vindicate.

“I never believed,” fumed Smith, “the day would come when we’d see an educational institution so flagrantly stupid, so selfish, so conspicuously aloof . . . These 18-, 19- and 20-year-old women evidently were either ignorant or insensitive to the fact that there were 94,635 rapes in the country in 2004, according to the FBI. Or they weren’t aware that rape is one of the most underreported crimes, which one would think should heighten any female’s sensitivity radar."

In other words: women are raped and the crime is probably an underreported one; so when men are falsely accused, all should remain silent.

“To think,” continued Smith, “once upon a time, academic institutions were held in high regard, a transitional haven for those moving from their teenage years to adulthood. What are we to think now when it’s clear that even at places such as Duke there’s an absence of common sense? . . . Perhaps, at some point, it would be wise to inform these ladies about the FBI’s rape statistics.”

The column oozed condescension. Imagine the hyper-sensitive Smith’s reaction if a white male columnist had penned a similar diatribe calling into question—without any foundation—the intelligence and character of African-American women.

After the case ended, Smith penned a column criticizing black leaders like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton for rushing to judgment. He never mentioned his column on the women’s lacrosse team.

Smith won’t be in a position to pen any more columns denouncing the women’s lacrosse players, or anyone else for that matter. Phawker reports that he has been stripped of his column and reassigned to a regular reporting beat. Since he spends little time in Philadelphia, presumably this move will end his career at the Inquirer. Perhaps he should ask to go out with one final column, an unqualified apology to the 2006 Duke women’s lacrosse team.

---------

An important letter recently ran in the Herald-Sun, from former Durham Police Department sergeant Jerry Grugin. He noted,

City Manager Patrick Baker realized the need for change within the Durham Police Department. Hiring Jose Lopez to lead the Police Department was the right move. He is in a strong position to make overdue command staff changes and Baker should remind him of this opportunity often. The circumstances of the Duke lacrosse fallout and other ill-advised departmental decisions reinforce the need for change.

The Whichard committee is currently investigating the Police Department. Some leaders of the department may be held accountable. The trail leading to ineptness will most certainly reach the highest levels of the department. When the end of the trail is reached, it will be interesting to see if the new chief and the City Council really believe change is needed.

It’s encouraging to see people speaking up from within the community, demanding change.

---------

According to the Herald-Sun, Governor Easley has a list of at least seven candidates for the vacant (permanent) DA’s slot. The list is not exactly distinguished. It leads with Tracey Cline, the ADA who came up with the idea of the wildly improper non-testimonial order for all 46 white lacrosse players—and the person that Mike Nifong said was prepared to assist him in prosecuting if a trial ever occurred. Before meriting any consideration, Cline should be asked to issue a public statement as to why she recommended the March 2006 NTO; and what, if anything, she learned from Nifong’s mishandling of the case.

The list also includes the two people Nifong defeated in the May 2006 primary—Freda Black and Keith Bishop. If the new DA should have any single quality, it should be that he or she is ethically pristine. Such a description certainly doesn’t apply to either Black or Bishop.

Another name on the list is Julian Mack, who has never prosecuted a case in North Carolina.

NCSpin, meanwhile, has floated another name: Judge (and former DA) Ron Stephens. That’s right—the same Judge Stephens who signed the NTO, did nothing as Nifong initiated the cases, and then (highly improperly) gave Nifong a de facto endorsement in a November article for (of course) the New York Times.

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Monday will feature the final post in the 15-part Group Profile series. Former dean of faculty William Chafe will be profiled. The series has attracted its share of (always anonymous) comments from Group members, sympathizers, or defenders. But their critique has varied: as one specious argument is rebuffed, they simply produce another. The basic order of their critique:

1. (Unspecified) posts took (unspecified) quotes out of (unspecified) context.
2. The posts are anti-intellectual, since I am responsible for anything and everything said by (anonymous) commenters. In this clip from the Colbert report, Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos dismissed the absurdity of this argument.
3. The posts focused only on the marginal members of the Group. In response, I did a post looking at the 20 marginal members of the Group, none of whom had been profiled.
4. The posts violated the principle of peer-review, because a historian cannot even describe work from outside his field. As it turns out, Duke has a tenure review committee where professors from outside a candidate’s field have weight on the candidate’s future employment.
5. The posts ignored the handful of Group members who were prestigious.
6. After I had said that Chafe (who by any definition is prestigious) would be the final post in the series, a Group defender suggested (for the first time) that Ariel Dorfman is the “elephant” in the room, someone whose intellectual talents cover whatever shortcomings the other 87 Group members possess.

Stay tuned Monday for the latest in pro-Group critiques.

Speaking of the Group, the Duke News site had an interesting post on two-career couples on the Duke faculty, noting that the couples interviewed “agreed that Duke was unusually open-minded and progressive in its recruitment policies.” Indeed, the article notes, “Duke was one of five universities to win the [Sloan] award in 2006 in recognition of its efforts in dual-career recruitment and retention. The award will also enable refinement of recruitment and retention policies developed at Duke in recent years.”

The article steered clear, however, of the two-couple faculty members among the anti-lacrosse extremists. No mention of Group members Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and Mary Hovsepian. Group member Anne Allison and “clarifying” professor Charlie Piot didn’t get a shout-out. And the Rom Coles-Kim Curtis partnership likewise was avoided.

Since the article’s purpose was to bring Duke good publicity, perhaps such discretion was wise in this case.

Hat tip: T.D.; apologies for the slight delay in posting tonight--connectivity problems

Tyson's Effects

The Group of 88 has offered myriad defenses for its rush to judgment in spring 2006. Perhaps none, however, is more peculiar than the irrelevancy argument. The basics: 88 members of the arts and sciences faculty took out a denunciatory ad about their own students, but no one noticed it—and, therefore, it had no effect. Directing criticism against the Group, according to this reasoning, is inappropriate.

This line of argument requires people to ignore the Chronicle (which noticed, and criticized, the ad almost immediately); the lacrosse players (who also noticed, and criticized, the ad almost immediately); and the defense lawyers (who would cite the ad prominently in their change-of-venue motion. It also requires the suspension of common sense: even in normal circumstances, 88 professors (and, the ad incorrectly claimed, five academic departments) at the area’s most prestigious institution issuing a public statement (“in the most easily seen venue on campus”) denouncing their own students would be big news. And this, of course, was a case with unprecedented media attention.

Today’s post looked at the remarks of just one Duke faculty member (Tim Tyson), who followed up his radio interview with a similarly guilt-presuming op-ed in the N&O. In the comment section, the post almost immediately attracted the party line from an (as always, anonymous) Group defender.

Oh, goody! Another hard-hitting expose on ... someone nobody reads, no one cares about, and who is non-tenure track, who makes no decisions about anything besides his reading list, at the far periphery of his department. Way to go, KC! Next up, detailed write-ups of pot-sellers and housewares employees at Sears who fuel this angry mob!

As much as Group defenders would like to rewrite history, however, a contemporaneous documentary record exists. In this case, just like the words of the Group, Tyson’s comments attracted immediate attention. Here’s an early April 2006 quote from N&O reporter Samiha Khanna, author of the widely condemned (and almost wholly false) March 25, 2006 “interview” with Crystal Mangum.

I think Tim Tyson taught readers Sunday about a history not many were aware had occurred. Durham is a place of many new residents, people who may not have the institutional knowledge of the university's history in the community. We are trying to explore these notions as we follow up on the story in the coming weeks. In response to your specific question about Mr. Tyson’s piece—I haven’t seen an equivalent piece in other publications. Many people have spoken out about a history of sex crimes on college campuses, but not issues of race and gender on the Duke campus specifically. These are keys to thorough follow-up stories that we are working to document. [emphases added]

Though it would take a few weeks, the N&O eventually recognized the inappropriateness of Tyson’s analogies for the specific case at hand. By late April, Khanna (and with her, the Tyson line) was basically off the case, and the work of Joe Neff, Ben Niolet, Anne Blythe, Eric Ferreri, and Michael Biesecker moved the paper in a very different direction.

On campus, however, it was full speed ahead for the Tyson/Group of 88 mindset. And Khanna’s quote provides a useful reminder that at a critical juncture in this case, journalists (unfortunately, as it turned out) were treating the guilt-presuming remarks of Duke professors seriously.

When Tim Was a Potbanger

Tim Tyson is one of two Duke faculty members (the other is Faulkner Fox, who has repeatedly declined comment about her behavior on the weekend of March 24-26, 2006) to admit to attending one of the potbangers’ events.

In a March 27, 2006 interview, Frank Stasio asked Tyson why he had done so.

Q: You were one of those who took part in a vigil over the weekend at the house where the alleged rape took place. Why were you there?

Tyson: Well, I was there as a teacher . . . somehow these young men have had available to them the best liberal arts education that money can buy, and they yet somehow failed to absorb any of its lessons. And so I guess I was there really because the women in the house that night were somebody’s daughter and somebody’s sister and somebody’s mother and somebody’s sweetheart. I think that we have to come together as a community and say that this is unacceptable on a number of different levels.

Just a few hours after Tyson attended—in his capacity as a “teacher”—the vigil outside of 610 N. Buchanan (below), where the crowd sang This Little Light of Mine, the “little light” herself, Crystal Mangum, was captured (below) on a video from the Platinum Pleasures Club, dancing in a most limber fashion.

No evidence exists that Tyson attended any vigils outside of the Platinum Pleasures Club, even though Mangum, presumably, remained “somebody’s sweetheart” on March 25, 2006.

Why was Mangum dancing that night? Tyson blamed society, while lionizing Mangum.

One of those young women, who is a mother of small children, is a student at North Carolina Central. Our society has not chosen to support people as they try to advance themselves and our economy by pursuing an education, so that people without means find themselves in desperate situations and seek desperate means of supporting themselves, while meanwhile we have this ghastly spectacle of these rich boys wanting her to dance naked, and making racially degrading remarks. 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.

The always quotable Butch Williams providing a devastating retort to the scarcely concealed paternalism evident in Tyson’s comments: “C’mon, kids. She wasn’t this little poor North Carolina Central student working the fields. She was a whore.”

Unlike Tyson, who presented Mangum as a stereotypical lower middle-class black woman, H.P. (“Fats”) Thomas actually knew the false accuser. Thomas described her motivations to Don Yaeger: Mangum was “more of a hooker than a stripper. She was stripping as advertising for hooking.” Defense lawyers, meanwhile, uncovered no evidence that Mangum even was a full-time NCCU student, much less that she was looking to—in Tyson’s words—”advance herself and our economy(!).”

Tyson never revealed—either in that March interview or anytime thereafter—who the neighbors were that confirmed “that there were a lot of racial insults thrown.” In fact, there was one neighbor who confirmed one racial slur—which, as we know now, was a response to a racial taunt from Kim Roberts. But why let the facts interfere with the metanarrative?

When asked how Duke should respond, Tyson hailed Brodhead as he ignored basic constitutional rights:

I have a lot of faith in President Brodhead. I think he’s a humanist of the first order and a wise man. I’m not content with Duke’s response partly because one of the really terrible things about this is that these young men are banding together and refusing to cooperate with the police investigation. I think that may be illegal. It’s certainly a violation of the spirit of the honor code of the university. It’s a terrible moral miscalculation that I think you have to be utterly blind to pursue . . . I wouldn’t—if I were in President Brodhead’s shoes, and I think he fills those shoes mighty well—I think I wouldn’t let this team continue to exist until the police get some cooperation from them. [emphasis added]

On March 27, 2006—the very same day that Tyson uttered those words—Bob Ekstrand, a lawyer for many of the lacrosse players, met with DA Mike Nifong, who three days previously had assumed personal command of the police investigation. Ekstrand stated that he had proof of innocence. But Nifong was interested only in statements that would confirm one of Mangum’s myriad, mutually contradictory stories. He told Ekstrand, “If you’ve come here to ask me questions instead of telling me what you know about who did it, then we don’t have anything to talk about. You’re wasting my time. You tell all of your clients I will remember their lack of cooperation at sentencing. I hope you know if they didn’t do it, they are all aiders and abettors, and that carries the same punishment as rape.”

In effect, Tyson wanted Brodhead to present the players with the following choice: they could (falsely) implicate one or more teammates in a crime that never occurred; or they would never play lacrosse again at Duke. Upon hearing his remarks, an outsider might suspect that Professor Tyson is a secret admirer of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who has taken a very similar approach to civil liberties.

Tyson is listed as among the instructors in the Duke History Department. Stasio asked the professor to use this academic training to provide historical context for the lacrosse players’ behavior. Tyson’s reply—which, of course, relied solely upon the version of events presented by the Nifong-led investigation—was nothing short of mindboggling:

It also smacks of a kind of minstrelsy. You know, rich boys used to hire black people to—they’d tie their hands behind their back and have them dip around in a barrel of flour for coins and bills. This used to be a thing that rich college boys liked to do . . . White men have been abusing black women for generations—you know, since the days of slavery. And this kind of sexualized mistreatment of people has been really at the heart of our racial caste system over the course of its history. 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. You know, James Baldwin said, “We’re trapped in history, and history is trapped in us.”

It certainly appears that Tyson was “trapped in history” in his rush to judgment about the case.

I e-mailed Tyson to ask whether—in light of the facts that have emerged since March 27, 2006—he considered his attendance at the vigil to be consistent with his responsibilities “as a teacher,” and whether he still believed the players’ approach to the Nifong-led DPD investigation “may [have been] illegal.”

Tyson’s response, in its entirety: “You can read my book and I’ll read yours.”

Chapter Six of the Duke Faculty Handbook requires professors to treat all Duke students—regardless of their race, class, gender, or athletic status—with “respect and consideration,” as “fellow members of the university community.” Despite its timidity in confronting apparent faculty misconduct, I don’t think even the Brodhead administration could credibly claim that a Duke professor publicly comparing Duke students to KKK members conforms to the provisions of the Faculty Handbook.

Fact-Checking Brodhead

If a crime had actually occurred last March 14, the Duke administration’s response to the lacrosse case would be considered a model for other universities to follow when high-profile students were charged with crimes. The basic message that was conveyed to alumni, donors, and the local elite: the administration has done everything it could to separate the University from the team, so that once a conviction occurs, no one can use the development to tarnish Duke.

In a slightly different context, this is the same strategy that the Atlanta Falcons employed in the Michael Vick case. In statements issued before Monday’s plea bargain, Arthur Blank never came out and said that he thought Vick was guilty. And he made formulaic references to the presumption of innocence. But no one reading Blank’s statements would have failed to understand exactly what the team owner believed.

There was, of course, only one problem with this strategy in the lacrosse case: no crime occurred. So the administration’s decision to go out of its way to avoid saying or doing anything that could be construed as favorable to the lacrosse players—while saying or doing lots of things that could be construed as hostile—has failed to stand the test of time.

A good example: President Richard Brodhead’s November 18, 2006 address to the Durham NAACP. (The text of this address wasn’t immediately available after delivery; I encountered it recently while looking through the Duke News website.) Brodhead opened his remarks by hailing local leaders who attended the banquet, appropriately condemning Duke’s past history of excluding African-American students, and (of course) affirming his commitment to diversity. He then spent four paragraphs on the lacrosse case. He began,

Let me now speak about a subject you may be wondering if I am going to touch on. There was an event of some fame that erupted last spring on the Duke campus on the borders of Duke and Durham. I will not, on this occasion, say anything about the facts of that case, and I will not, on this occasion, say anything that relates to any person who was a party to that case. But that case has been a burden to us all and I do, in part, know why. I do understand that, not what factually happened—we don’t know that—but what was alleged to have happened had a special emotional charge because the idea of white men commandeering black women for their pleasure has a painful history. It has a history one could not ignore, and that history was activated. In the spring, it became part of my work to remind people of the presumption of innocence. More than one person from this city asked me if I thought, if it had been a black man and white women, would that person have enjoyed the same presumption of innocence? If they’d asked me if they would enjoy it from me, my answer would have been, “You bet they would have.” But I understand why people asked that question because, in truth, in our history, among the other unequal advantages people have had, some people have not had the same benefit of those presumptions that others have. And I understand that that is part of the situation we have lived through.

It is, of course, important to place events in context, to understand how the past affects the present. But political, media, and academic leaders also have a responsibility to exercise leadership, thereby ensuring that their communities aren’t governed by the passions of the mob—especially on an issue that, as Brodhead noted, involved a “special emotional charge.”

In the months before Brodhead spoke to the NAACP:
--local “activists” had held protest marches outside of the lacrosse house, carrying a “castrate” banner;
--local “activists” had distributed “wanted” posters around campus;
--members of a nationally recognized hate group had made death threats against a Duke student;
--the co-chair of the DA’s citizens committee had screamed, outside 610 N. Buchanan, “Burn it down!”

Surely such acts couldn’t be rationalized or excused “because the idea of white men commandeering black women for their pleasure has a painful history.” And perhaps an address before the NAACP was not the appropriate time for Brodhead to exercise leadership and condemn those who—even if motivated by a “special emotional charge”—went overboard. But Brodhead never publicly condemned any of the acts above. Indeed, in April 2006, he actually shared the stage with the only Duke student who publicly admitted distributing “wanted” posters, Dinushika Mohottige.

As for Brodhead’s claim that “in the spring, it became part of my work to remind people of the presumption of innocence,” this was, after all, the same man whose 2377-word April 5, 2006 statement (his last before the first arrests) didn’t even mention presumption of innocence. And on April 20, he informed the Durham Chamber of Commerce, in his first public appearance after the arrests of Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty, “If they didn’t do it, whatever they did is bad enough.”

Brodhead continued,

At the same time, I saw a quote from someone—I never knew who, it was quoted on TV—who said last spring, “I don’t really care if the accused people are guilty or innocent. I would just be happy to see them convicted.” I saw that quoted by a reporter. (I actually found these sorts of quotes were much more common on TV than in reality.) I saw that statement quoted to a student leader from North Carolina Central University. And you know what he said? He said, “What a stupid thing to say.” He said, “I don’t know anyone who thinks that.” He said, “Everyone I know thinks we should have the truth be established and then let’s have justice be rendered.”

The insinuation: most NCCU students didn’t rush to judgment; the media exploited the situation to make it appear otherwise; the comment came from a stray person a TV reporter probably picked up strolling across campus.

In fact, the comment (student Chan Hall “said he wanted to see the Duke students prosecuted ‘whether it happened or not. It would be justice for things that happened in the past’”) appeared not on TV, but in print—in Newsweek, no less. Even if Brodhead couldn’t track down the name of the student, surely his press office could easily have done so. Far from being unrepresentative of campus opinion, Hall seemed to reflect it—as the comments of other NCCU students from the April 11, 2006 forum suggested. And the unnamed student government leader quoted by Brodhead? It’s hard to see how the student could say “I don’t know anyone who thinks that”—given that Hall himself was an NCCU student government leader. (He was head of the Government Affairs Committee, and a candidate for speaker.) A Lexis/Nexis search of U.S. newspapers; TV and radio broadcast transcripts; wire service reports; web publications; and blogs found no record of the quote provided by Brodhead, attributed to an NCCU student government leader or to anyone else.

Perhaps, it could be argued, NCCU student opinion had tempered by the time Brodhead made his speech. Not exactly. As late as February, when Mike Nifong’s case had been exposed (even to Brodhead) as a fraud, a Baltimore Sun article jarringly opened in the following manner: “Seventeen North Carolina Central University undergraduates in a communications class were asked to think like a jury: Raise your hand if you believe the accuser in the Duke lacrosse sexual assault case fabricated her story. The students in the cramped cinderblock classroom looked at each other and at the reporter posing the issue. Not a single hand was raised.”

In the Yaeger/Pressler book, N&O columnist Ruth Sheehan admitted that she rushed to judgment in part because Duke officials—contrary to her expectations—failed, in any way, to “spin” the story to their students’ benefit. Why, then, did Brodhead feel compelled, months later, to “spin” on behalf of NCCU students, by suggesting their response to the case was more moderate than (at least) the media record suggested?

Brodhead concluded his case-related remarks in the following way:

That’s another community value that we have between us, because the world of due process and of justice based on evidence, that’s a world we all need. The day it’s us up there, we’ll need the benefit of the law and due process. We’ll need the benefit of the presumption of innocence. We’ll need the benefit of waiting until the facts are in before judgment is rendered. We all need that. But I must say, people who have not had the full benefit of the law have as much or more to lose as anybody from the opposite world: a world where prejudice is allowed to make decisions through prejudgment, a world in which you can decide whether someone is guilty by deciding what category of humanity they belong to, or a world in which people feel free to reach conclusions without taking the trouble to establish the facts.

Brodhead was, of course, speaking to a group whose statewide website featured an 82-point, error-riddled memorandum of law that was a classic example of “where prejudice is allowed to make decisions through prejudgment, a world in which you can decide whether someone is guilty by deciding what category of humanity they belong to, or a world in which people feel free to reach conclusions without taking the trouble to establish the facts.” Surely, if Brodhead meant what he said about not rushing to judgment, he would have been compelled to make some mention of this document? Instead, the president ignored the NAACP’s memorandum of law.

Brodhead’s remarks about due process, meanwhile, are worth considering in context. Between April and December 2006, the president essentially claimed that due process required people to suspend judgment about all aspects of the case until a trial occurred, in which (as he stated in a July 2006 letter) “we are eager for our students to be proved innocent.”

But, of course, due process extends beyond the presumption of innocence (and certainly beyond an argument that trials exist for people “to be proved innocent”). Due process also requires the state to follow its own rules and regulations. By the time of the president’s NAACP speech, Mike Nifong’s improper public statements were documented (indeed, the Bar had already drafted up an ethics complaint). So too was Nifong’s decision to order the police to violate their own procedures and confine the April 4 lineup to lacrosse players. Surely, if Brodhead meant what he said about upholding due process, he would have been compelled to make some mention of such behavior? Instead, the president remained silent.

In his contemporaneous article about the speech, Cash Michaels reported that the NAACP leaders greeted Brodhead’s remarks with gushing applause. It’s not hard to see why.

[Update, 9.26am: Friends of Duke spokesperson Jason Trumpbour adds some important insights:

The Duke News and Communications Office usually dutifully posts every single public remark made by the president including sneezes and yawns. I was very surprised that I could not find a fairly significant address such as this one. I thought it telling that Duke wanted to maintain good relations with the local NAACP, but did not want to play that fact up because state and local NAACP officials were among the biggest hoax enablers. In addition to that libelous memorandum, there was also the William Barber sermon in Duke Chapel trashing the players, Irving Joyner’s “expert commentary,” funding the Our Heart’s World website and the huge screech they put up when the defense filed a motion for a change in venue.

President Brodhead’s speech seems to have been added to the site much later. Compare this page from today to this one from archive.org retrieved on April 7, 2007. The November 18 item is not there in the latter. I cannot tell when they added it because archive.org’s list of retrievals stops in May for some reason and there is a glitch in the internal links pointing to that same page after April 7. However, that archive index for 2006 page appears to be unchanged for all of early 2007.

Why did Duke add this item months later? Is it because President Brodhead gave some mumble mouthed tribute to due process and this somehow brings his word total on this subject up? I have to say that he did talk about due process and the presumption of innocence a little more forcefully than he ever did elsewhere, more forcefully being an entire paragraph on the subject which, as KC points out, he qualifies in other paragraphs.

The problem is that President Brodhead’s idea of due process meant making sure the case went to trial so that no one could say that Duke was behind any dismissal and having the case go to trial was exactly what the local NAACP wanted, because a guilty verdict would allow them to do an end run around all the evidence and impose their own version of reality by clothing it as the product of legal process, essentially Nifong’s agenda. Does Duke think people are unaware or have forgotten about all this?

Indeed, his urging his audience to wait for the legal process to run its course at a time when Nifong and the police were doing everything in their power to corrupt and pervert that process without any sort of recognition of this fact by him is positively sick. In any event, if this is all President Brodhead said when given the chance to speak to some of the biggest hoax enablers in defense of his students, then he should be embarrassed not proud of these remarks.]

The Department of Non-Corrections

Jack Shafer, the press correspondent at Slate, had an interesting column last week. He commented, “The average newspaper should expand by a factor of 50 the amount of space given to corrections if [University of Oregon journalism professor] Scott R. Maier’s research is any guide.”

In a survey of 3600 articles from ten newspapers, Maier and his researchers discovered 2615 factual errors in 1220 stories. Yet, as Shafer noted, “Just 23 of the flawed stories—less than 2 percent—generated newspaper corrections. No paper corrected more than 4.2 percent of its flawed articles.” Even more alarmingly, Shafer suggested that the Times (which still hasn’t corrected the three factual errors, two of them major, in Duff Wilson’s August 2006 article) is actually more rigorous than most newspapers in publishing corrections.

Two recent, serious, and non‑Times non-corrections come to mind. In an August 1 article in the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, reporter Tim McGlone profiled Michael Vick’s legal team, which included “Durham, N.C., attorney James D. ‘Butch’ Williams. He represented one of the unindicted co-conspirators in the Duke lacrosse team rape case, which ended in dismissals against all those accused.”

The term “unindicted co-conspirator” has a precise legal definition. Here is my colleague, Stuart Taylor, describing the term as it applied to the Whitewater case and former Clinton aide Bruce Lindsey:

The prosecutor is saying in essence in court—and they haven’t said it yet by the way--but they apparently will—that we believe this man was part of the criminal conspiracy, along with the people who are on trial. We haven’t indicted him but the relevance of that for the purposes of the trial is that lets them get in more evidence about the unindicted co-conspirator’s or the alleged unindicted co-conspirator’s out-of-court statements than they otherwise could. It’s a way around the hearsay rule . . . For example, if they want to--somebody, one of their witnesses, to talk about what Bruce Lindsey said to him, ordinarily that would be barred by the so-called hearsay rule. You can’t talk --you can’t testify in a trial about what somebody else said out of court. That rule has a lot of exceptions. One of the exceptions is if the person who you’re trying to quote, here Bruce Lindsey, is named by the prosecution as an unindicted co-conspirator, then you can talk about what he said out of court.

Mike Nifong never made such a determination about Williams’ client (Dan Flannery). In fact, Nifong said exactly the opposite, releasing a public statement last May saying that no charges would be brought against anyone other than the three (falsely accused) targets.

I brought this record to McGlone’s attention, and asked if he would be running a correction. He declined, noting that similar language had appeared in the AP wire-service story about Williams. Yet here’s how that story described Williams and the lacrosse case: “A Durham lawyer who represented an unindicted player in the now-debunked Duke lacrosse rape case is working on another high-profile sports case: the dogfighting investigation involving NFL quarterback Michael Vick.” [emphasis added]

A reader from Norfolk, John Deal, pointed out the problem in a letter to the editor about Flannery: “Unindicted yes, but clearly he was not a ‘co-conspirator.’ Instead of using a catchy but inaccurate phrase, how about referring to him as ‘one of the members of the Duke lacrosse team subjected last year to a false accusation of rape’? It just goes to show how difficult it will be to change public perceptions even after the attorney general of North Carolina went out of his way to declare the innocence of those actually charged. In the wake of one of the worst cases of prosecutorial misconduct, an accurate press could help."

Letters to the editor, of course, aren’t corrections; and as of today, the Virginian-Pilot archives reveal no correction of McGlone’s error.

Meanwhile, the Liestoppers discussion board has a lengthy thread on one of the most dubious articles from early in the case, the April 11 column from Eric Adelson.

That column stated,

A source has provided ESPN with a detailed account of the exotic dancer’s arrival at the hospital the night of the alleged sexual assault at a party thrown by members of the Duke men’s lacrosse team.

The source, who asked to remain anonymous, was present at the hospital on the night of the alleged incident and says the woman was “beat up” but would not immediately divulge to anyone the identity of her alleged assailants.

“She was hysterical,” the source said. “She was crying, she was pretty banged up. She said she was sexually assaulted, but she didn’t say by whom.”

The source says the woman entered the hospital well after midnight March 13 wearing a red nightgown and nothing on her feet. She was walking on her own, but there were bruises on her face, neck, and arms.

A triage nurse attended to her, but the woman did not want him to touch her because he was a man. She was then examined by a sexual assault nurse.

There were injuries to the woman’s pelvic area, the source said.

According to the source, the woman did not immediately inform either the police or the hospital staff who inflicted the injuries to her.

“She never said one thing about Duke, any athlete or anything,” the source said. “She just kept hollering and screaming. She never said who did it.”

The woman was discharged after approximately five hours.

The timing of Adelson’s article certainly raised eyebrows. The piece appeared one day after: (a) defense attorneys revealed that the DNA tests Mike Nifong’s office had promised would exonerate the innocent produced no matches; and (b) Nifong learned from Dr. Brian Meehan that not only did Crystal Mangum’s rape kit contain no matches to lacrosse players, but there matches to the DNA of multiple, unidentified males.

With the benefit of hindsight, all the italicized items in Adelson’s article appear unsustainable.

We know now:

• Multiple photographs of Crystal Mangum taken between 12.00am and 12.41 am on the morning of March 14 showed no “bruises on her face, neck, and arms.”
  
• A 12.31am videotape of Crystal Mangum taken on March 14 showed no “bruises on her face, neck, and arms.”


• The statement from Kim Roberts, who was with Mangum from 12.41am through around 1.20am on March 14 made no mention of “bruises on her face, neck, and arms.”


• The statements of the first three police officers to see Mangum on March 14 made no mention of “bruises on her face, neck, and arms.”
  
• The statement of the Durham Access Center nurse, who saw Mangum around 1.40am, March 14, made no mention of “bruises on her face, neck, and arms.”


• The written reports of seven doctors and nurses at Duke Hospital who saw Mangum between 2.00am and 8.00am on March 14—including the transparently biased Tara Levicy, who later would be willing to shift her story to accomodate the ever-changing prosecution tale—made no mention of “bruises on her face, neck, and arms.”


• The written reports of the UNC medical staff, who saw Mangum on March 15, made no mention of “bruises on her face, neck, and arms.”


• This and other police photographs made clear that, as of March 16, Mangum had no “bruises on her face, neck, and arms.”


• The Attorney General’s comprehensive inquiry discovered no evidence that, on the morning of March 14, Mangum had “bruises on her face, neck, and arms.”

The logical conclusion from the above: Adelson’s source lied to him. At the very least, the source should be identified so his or her veracity can be tested. Yet Adelson has continued to stand behind the story; no correction has appeared.

Citing items from the discovery file, the Liestoppers discussion board participants have made a very strong case that Adelson’s source was Duke Police Officer Sara Falcon, a graduate of Fayetteville Technical Community College who had joined the Duke force (as a trainee) five months before the lacrosse party. Falcon is the only person in the record who made the odd claim that Mangum refused treatment from a “male triage nurse.” SANE nurse-in-training Levicy, on the other hand, had suggested that Mangum had become hysterical when left alone in the room with an unnamed white, male rape crisis counselor who Levicy could not describe.

Falcon appeared in one other context in the case: the Bowen/Chambers report faulted Duke officials for not paying more attention to her version of events, and instead relying on the (truthful) recollection of Officer Christopher Day that he overheard a Durham police officer say that Mangum claimed to have been raped by 20 men. Bowen and Chambers did not explain why the Duke administration should have given such weight to a trainee officer who had less than a half-year of experience.

If, in fact, a Duke employee was the source for Adelson’s highly damaging article, it would raise further questions about the University’s bias against the lacrosse players.

And, if Shafer is correct, we won’t be seeing corrections from either ESPN or the Virginian-Pilot any time soon.

Hat tip: L.E.