Until Proven
Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke
Lacrosse Rape Case by Stuart Taylor Jr. and KC Johnson (2007, Thomas Dunne
Books/St. Martin’s Press, 420 pp.)
It’s Not About the
Truth: The Untold Story of the Duke Lacrosse Case and the Lives It Shattered
by Don Yaeger with Mike Pressler (2007, Threshold Editions, 321 pp.)
A Rush To Injustice:
How Power, Prejudice, Racism, and Political Correctness Overshadowed Truth and
Justice in the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case by Nader Baydoun and R. Stephanie
Good (2007, Thomas Nelson, 260 pp.)
For “these professors,” it is “a war or a revolution. … In
the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the
gallows. …” Those prescient words of Edmund Burke described intellectuals
encouraging the French Revolution and foretold the Jacobin Reign of Terror —
wrought not with gallows, but with the guillotine, an instrument of the
intellectuals. Burke’s words, written over two centuries ago, resonate now
regarding the Duke University intellectuals who rushed to condemn the Duke
lacrosse players accused of gang rape at their infamous 2006 spring-break
party.
Neither the gallows nor the guillotine awaited the Duke
lacrosse players, but Jacobin-like protesters marched in the street to their
house. They shouted threats through bullhorns, banged pots and chanted, “They
must be rapists!” They declared: “You can’t rape and run,” decreed the players
“wanted” and demanded that they “confess.” As punishment to fit the presumed
crime, the pot bangers proposed “give them equal measure” and “castrate!”
The pot bangers and their Duke enablers are contemporary
equivalents to Jacobins, and “reign of terror” describes their actions better
than their own “metanarrative” about the gang-rape allegations. Under that
narrative — derived from their academic theory that all people and events must
be viewed through a race/class/gender prism — the accuser, a black female
“exotic dancer,” presumably poor and paid by white boys to entertain at their
party, had to be believed, and the white boys, presumably rich and “privileged”
in academic jargon, had to be guilty.
These professors were defined in a Weekly Standard cover
story as “Duke’s Tenured Vigilantes,” driven in their rush to judgment by
“angry feminism, ethnic victimology” and “upgraded Marxism.” Some of the
professors, who came to be called the Group of 88, published a full-page
proclamation in the student newspaper of a “Social Disaster,” claiming they
were “listening to our students” who were “shouting and whispering about what
happened to this young woman.” Published soon after the pot bangers had
proclaimed the lacrosse players rapists and proposed their castration, the
Group of 88 announced that they were “turning up the volume” and added: “To the
students speaking individually and to the protesters making collective noise,
thank you for not waiting and for making yourselves heard.”
The pot bangers’ noise and the professors’ proclamation played
well in Durham, a former mill town rife with race and class resentments that
energized its “progressive” agitators. With its largest employer now Duke
University — an elite, highly ranked, largely white university — Durham
presented the perfect setting for the race/class/gender narrative to define the
white-on-black rape allegations. There, as a leader of the Group of 88 said,
the accused lacrosse players with their “privileged” social standing presented
“perfectness as offenders.”
With the exception of this magazine, the media,
well-schooled in the race/ class/gender narrative, quickly portrayed the
accuser as a poor-black-girl-done-wrong and the accused as
guilty-rich-white-boys. Starting with The News & Observer, the narrative
soon surfaced on the front page of The New York Times, on the cover of Newsweek
and elsewhere. Basking in media coverage, especially by the Durham Herald-Sun,
the Durham prosecutor, the now-disgraced Mike Nifong, capitalized on the
narrative for his election campaign to seek votes from Durham blacks. Nifong
assured them that “a rape occurred,” the rape combined “gang-like rape
activity” with “racial slurs and general hostility,” and the lacrosse players
were “a bunch of hooligans.” At a campaign rally, Nifong assured Durham blacks:
“I’m not going to allow Durham’s view in the minds of the world to be a bunch
of lacrosse players at Duke raping a black girl from Durham.”
Despite the narrative’s dominance, some skeptics spoke, such
as one who recalled the Tawana Brawley false-rape hoax in New York 10 years
ago, and called the charges “Tawana Does Duke.” More prominently, the late Ed
Bradley of CBS’s 60 Minutes spoke skeptically and cautioned about such niceties
as the presumption of innocence. As a result, and as defense lawyers for the
three lacrosse players indicted by Nifong began to counter his prejudicial
public statements, some media reconsidered. News & Observer columnist Ruth
Sheehan recanted her earlier rush to judgment, and News & Observer reporter
Joseph Neff countered the narrative with facts. The facts trumped the
narrative, as New York Times columnist David Brooks acknowledged, while
Newsweek’s Evan Thomas lamented, “The narrative was right. The facts were
wrong.”
Because of the facts, the case collapsed. In sum: The lacrosse
players’ lawyers exposed ethical violations by Nifong that forced him to turn
the case over to the state attorney general, who after investigating the
charges and interviewing the accuser (efforts not undertaken earlier by
Nifong), declared not only that there was no credible evidence to support the
charges, but that the three indicted players — whose names have been smeared
enough and need not be repeated here — were “innocent,” as well. The attorney
general added that the accuser, Crystal Mangum, had made many inconsistent
statements about her allegations and may be delusional. Indeed, she made her
first allegation only upon being confronted by police, after she had passed out
in a second dancer’s car, and facing transport by the police to a mental health
facility.
While the legal system has dismissed the wrongful charges
against the innocent players and disbarred and jailed Nifong for lying to the
court, much remains to be done in Durham. Some of its officials and Nifong now
face civil-law claims in federal court alleging violation of the constitutional
rights of the three lacrosse players and proposing federal monitoring of Durham
police.
Much remains to be done at Duke, as well. The school has
settled claims against it by the three players, reportedly paying them millions
of dollars to protect not only itself, but also its employees, including the
Group of 88. Duke’s willingness to protect the Group of 88 is understandable,
but it is regrettable that these “tenured vigilantes” will not suffer civil-law
consequences for the criminal-law prosecution they willed upon their students.
In any event, Duke and its vigilantes are receiving much-deserved scrutiny,
including three recent books.
It’s Not About the Truth, by Don Yaeger with former Duke
lacrosse coach Mike Pressler, provides a poignant account of the case’s effects
on the players, their families and their friends. The title comes from a retort
to Pressler, convinced of his players’ innocence and protesting that Duke must
stand for the truth, by Duke athletic director Joe Alleva: “It’s not about the
truth anymore. It’s about the faculty, the special interest groups, the
protesters, our reputation, the integrity of the University.”
The integrity of the University comes up short also in A
Rush To Injustice, by former Duke football player Nader Baydoun. Now an
experienced trial lawyer, he concludes that the Duke leadership was less
interested in the truth than politically correct posturing to please the media
and the faculty vigilantes.
The Duke leadership, the media and the vigilantes fare even
worse in Until Proven Innocent, the authoritative account of the case. Its
title comes from a statement by Duke President Richard Brodhead that the
accused students must await criminal trial if they were to be “proved
innocent.” Its co-authors are Stuart Taylor, a writer on legal issues with a
Harvard law degree, and KC Johnson, a history professor with a Harvard
doctorate. They are not intimidated by the pretensions of the Group of 88 or
the prominence of Brodhead. Until Proven Innocent chronicles the wrongs of the
Group of 88, the Duke leadership and others.
The wrongs were many: the accuser’s fabulist allegations;
the rush to judgment by the pot bangers, their Group of 88 enablers and their
media celebrants; Nifong’s political-play prosecution of the three players; and
the apparent acceptance of the players’ guilt by Duke’s leadership, reportedly
cowed by the Group of 88. If anyone at Duke looks good, it is not President
Brodhead (even after his recent, belated apology to the players), his vice
president, John Burness (who reportedly made disparaging off-the-record
comments to the media about the players) or Athletic Director Joe Alleva (“it’s
not about the truth”). Perhaps they can be excused for early reliance on Nifong.
But some Duke professors and many Duke students were not taken in by Nifong.
Condemned by a significant segment of their own faculty and by much of the
media, the accused players, writers for the student newspaper and other Duke
students showed better judgment than their tenured tormentors and better
journalism than The New York Times. If Brodhead, Burness and Alleva cannot be
proud of their own performances during the case, they can be proud of many Duke
students. But Duke students should not be proud of them nor of the Group of 88.
It’s Not About the Truth noted: “College campuses are a
breeding ground for radical left-leaning faculty. They are often anti-American,
anti-white male and anti any other facet of our society that has enjoyed
‘privilege’ at one time or another. Duke’s campus was no exception.” In fact,
at least since Stanley Fish’s influence in the 1980s as chairman of its English
department, Duke has been a national leader in recruiting radicals to its
humanities and some social science disciplines. The radicals displaced the
traditional curriculum of great literature and academic history, contending
that the canon was no more worthy of study than comics and popular culture
texts.
Thus, it should have surprised no one that Duke students are
exposed to popular culture idioms like comic Chris Rock’s joke thanking black
grandparents for cotton shirts and the novel American Psycho’s story of
skinning women alive. But when it was reported that a lacrosse player had used
the cotton shirt line and another had used the American Psycho scene, critics
ignored that Duke professors have assigned American Psycho in classes, its film
version has been available in the freshman library, and a professor testified
at a black rapper’s pornography trial that his racist and sexist lyrics were
artistic expression. That academic world assigns many culturally degrading
works and has become center stage for playing Antonio Gramsci’s script calling
for destruction of the culture as a precondition to a Marxist revolution.
Leading characters following that script include some
members of the Group of 88. One, Mark Anthony Neal, described himself in Duke’s
alumni magazine as a “thugniggaintellectual” and promised to use his
“intellectual persona” to do “‘gangster’ scholarship . . . just hard, hard-core
intellectual thuggery.” Amid such thuggery, Group of 88 leader Wahneena Lubiano
proclaimed that “sabotage has to be the order of the day.” No need to worry
about her sabotage, however, as she has assured us that “we’ll all get along
together after the revolution’s over.” Revolution is the order of the day for
such radicals, as exemplified by another member of the Group of 88, Michael
Hardt. A Duke literature professor and self-described “joyful communist,” Hardt
has called for the end of the capitalist “empire.”
The Group of 88 has protested that they have been
“misinterpreted,” and some of them have accused their critics of “McCarthyism.”
In rejoinder, Until Proven Innocent accuses them of “academic McCarthyism.”
Read Until Proven Innocent, and decide for yourself who are the McCarthyites —
or really, who are the revolutionary Jacobins.
THE INDOCTRINATION
UNIVERSITY
By Arch T. Allen
Among good teaching at colleges and universities, there are
some bad usurpations of professorial platforms for indoctrination. The
indoctrination efforts are exposed on anecdotal bases largely, but evidence
exists of systemic efforts in some disciplines, such as neo-Marxist humanities
and social sciences courses, especially gender, race and ethnic identity
studies.
Indoctrination U: The Left’s War Against Academic Freedom
(2007), by David Horowitz, exposes these efforts and proposes an antidote, an
“Academic Bill of Rights.” For more information, go to
www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org. Whether Horowitz proposes the correct cure
for this academic ill remains to be seen, but his diagnosis exposes a cancer
within the academy. Its malicious cells are multiplying like so many Ward
Churchills, the fraudulent professor recently fired from the University of
Colorado, and withstanding Horowitz’s proposed cure. Their exaggerations and
misrepresentations of his proposal show that he has hit some sensitive nerves.
Indoctrinate U, a documentary film by Evan Maloney, has
premiered at a film festival and is being promoted for public distribution. For
more information, go to www.indoctrinate-u.com.