On April 11, Roy Cooper, the
North Carolina Attorney General, announced that he was
dropping all charges against the three Duke lacrosse players
who had been
indicted for kidnapping and
raping a black stripper in March 2006. As Mr. Cooper stressed, he was
dropping the case not because there
was insufficient evidence—often a euphemism for “probably
guilty, but we can’t prove it”—but because the three players were innocent of the
charges that had recklessly been brought against them. Mr.
Cooper went further: not only had there been “a tragic rush
to accuse and a failure to verify serious allegations,” but
the case also showed “the enormous consequences of
overreaching by a prosecutor.”
In fact, the Duke lacrosse case showed a number of things.
Yes, there was the issue of the disgraced District Attorney Michael Nifong
running amok, suppressing evidence and
cynically bartering the lives of three white lacrosse
players in his populist bid to win reelection in racially
divided Durham. Nifong was certainly part of that “tragic
rush to accuse.” As was Syracuse University, which decided not
to accept as transfers any students from the Duke lacrosse
team—not just the three accused chaps, mind you, but
anyone contaminated by having played lacrosse for Duke.
But there are at least two other aspects of the
case that deserve comment. One is the role of the media,
which with few exceptions descended on the story
like Lord Byron’s fabled Assyrian and his cohorts pursuing
the destruction of Sennacherib. Oh, how The New York
Times, The Boston Globe, and countless other bastions of
liberal self-satisfaction loved it! Race. Class. Sex.
Victimhood. It was the perfect morality tale. Those white
jocks at “the Harvard of the South” just had to be guilty.
And what a good time we were all going to have lacerating
the malefactors while at the same time preening ourselves on
our own superior virtue!
The editorials, the op-eds, the comments, the
analyses poured forth non-stop, demonstrating that one of
the deepest human passions is the urge to self-righteous
pontification. The novelist Allan Gurganis epitomized the
tone in an op-ed last April: “The children of privilege,” he
thundered, “feel vividly alive only while victimizing, even
torturing.” You don’t say? Even sports writers got into the
act. Selena Roberts located Duke University “at the
intersection of entitlement and enablement, … virtuous
on the outside, debauched on the inside.” In August, as
Nifong’s case was betraying worrisome fissures, the Times
published a 7,000-word article arguing—“praying” might be a
more apposite term—that, whatever weaknesses there might be
in the prosecution’s case, “there is also a body of evidence
to support [taking] the matter to a jury.” As the Times
columnist David Brooks ruefully noted after the tide had
turned, the campaign against the athletes had the lineaments
of a “witch hunt.”
Not, of course, that the Times was alone. Even after the
lacrosse players had been declared innocent, The Boston
Globe began an editorial stating that
“three members of the Duke lacrosse team may have been
louts, but all the evidence suggests they were not rapists.”
“Suggests,” you see. Not “shows” or “demonstrates,” even
though the Attorney General declared the athletes innocent of all
charges. And what
evidence is there to suggest that they are “louts”? They
have to be louts, countless character references
and testimonials to the contrary, otherwise the story wouldn’t
go according to script.
The other aspect of the Duke lacrosse fiasco that
deserves special scrutiny is the behavior of university
officials, especially the faculty. So let’s see: there is a
wild allegation of gang rape. What does Richard Brodhead,
Duke’s president, do? He remembers that in America there is
the fundamental principle that one is innocent until proven
guilty, so he urges patience and discretion, and displays
statesmanlike leadership in helping Duke negotiate the
troubled waters stirred up by the incident.
Just kidding. What President Brodhead really did was to suspend
the accused students, fire the lacrosse coach, cancel the
rest of the team’s season, and pander to every possible
interest, but especially to those baying for the heads of
the accused. (One commentator estimated that only 3 percent
of Brodhead’s statements could be construed as supporting
the accused students.) And then there is the Duke faculty. As Vincent Carroll,
writing recently in the Rocky Mountain News, noted, “the
most astonishing fact, hands down, was and remains the
squalid behavior of the community of scholars at Duke
itself. For months nearly the entire faculty fell into one
of two camps: those who demanded the verdict first and the
trial later, and those whose silence enabled their vigilante
colleagues to set the tone.”
Particularly egregious was the behavior of the “Group of 88,”
a congeries of faculty activists and fellow-travelers who
signed “What Does a Social Disaster Sound Like?,” a
full-page manifesto published in April 2006 in the Duke
student newspaper. The statement, which purported to be
“listening” to students on campus, mingled anonymous student
comments with racialist agitprop. “Regardless of the results
of the police investigation,” ran part of the introductory
comment, “what is apparent everyday now is the anger and
fear of many students who know themselves to be objects of
racism and sexism.” There followed a mosaic of histrionic
proclamations:
“We want the absence of terror,” one student is supposed to
have said. “But we don’t really know what that means.”
“This is not a different experience for us here at Duke
University. We go to class with racist classmates, we go to
gym with people who are racists …”
The Group of 88 had clearly mastered the art of feigning
shock in order to rivet attention and generate anxiety.
But as Richard Bertrand Spencer noted in The American
Conservative,
“Far from coming as a shock, the accusations that white
students gang-raped a black stripper reached the Group as a
kind of fulfillment of a dream. The case was, for them, an
affirmation of what they always knew about Duke, Durham, and
American society in general.” According to the Group of 88,
the alleged rape of a black woman by three white men was
just business as usual in racist America. In fact, as the journalist Robert VerBruggen reported,
“white-on-black rape is so rare there really isn’t any way
to measure its ups and downs.” For five out of the last ten
years, the National Crime Victimization Survey put the
number at zero for its respondents.
But reality counts for little in the febrile world of the
Group of 88. How little? Wahneema Lubiano, a tenured associate professor
of literature and African-American studies, summed it up
with all possible clarity when
she wrote “regardless of the ‘truth,’ whatever happens with the court case, what
people are asking is that something changes.” Note the
deflationary scare quotes around the word “truth.” Truth is
expendable (if, indeed, it even exists): what matters is
political action. So: it doesn’t matter what those lacrosse
players actually did; what matters is who they are: where
they fit in the racial-sexual-ethnic constellation of merit.
As Professor Lubiano gleefully noted on her blog, members of
the lacrosse team “are almost perfect offenders” because
they’re “the exemplars of the upper end of the class
hierarchy … and the dominant social group on campus.”
Some of the Group of 88 are common or garden-variety
academic liberals—timid souls whose long tenure
in the protected purlieus of the university surrounded by
adolescents has nurtured their risible sense of
self-importance and political enlightenment. But a good
percentage are radicals more devoted to political activism than
scholarship. Indeed, one scandal that still has not received
sufficient publicity is the preposterous
pseudo-scholarship purveyed by many trendy academics.
A look at the CVs of many members of the Group
of 88 provides a case in point, partly shocking, partly embarrassing. It’s 99
percent race-class-gender gibberish embroidered with a
toxic dollop of ill-digested lit-crit-speak and infatuation
with the dregs of pop culture. “Shuckin’ Off the African-American Native Other: What’s
PoMo Got to Do with It?,” Soul Babies: Black Popular
Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic, etc. This is
scholarship at one of America’s best
universities?
One of the central players in the scandal
was Houston A. Baker, Jr., a former president of the
Modern Language Association who has built his career through
a carefully orchestrated fabrication of race scandals and
juvenile cultural relativism. (Choosing between
Shakespeare and Jacqueline
Susann, he once wrote, is “no different from choosing
between a hoagy and a pizza,” adding that “I am
one whose career is dedicated to the day when we have a
disappearance of those standards.”) Soon after the lacrosse
scandal broke, Professor Baker called for
“immediate dismissals of those principally responsible for
the horrors of this spring moment at Duke. Coaches of the
lacrosse team, the team itself and its players, and any
other agents who silenced or lied about the real nature of
events.” He joined the other members of the Group of 88 in
signing a “thank you” letter to campus radicals
who had distributed a “wanted” poster of the
lacrosse players and publicly branded them “rapists.”
After the more serious charges against the three students were
dropped in December, the mother of another member of the
team emailed to ask if he would reconsider his
comments. Professor Baker’s response is illuminating:
LIES You are just a provacateur [sic] on a happy New
Years [sic] Eve trying to get credit for a scummy bunch of
white males! …I really hope whoever sent this stupid farce of an email
rots in… . umhappy [sic] new year to you … and forgive
me if your [sic] really are, quite sadly, mother of a “farm
animal.”
Houston Baker was the
George D. and Susan Fox Beischer Professor of English at
Duke (how proud the Beischers must be); he has recently decamped to a distinguished professorship
at Vanderbilt University. What does that tell us about the
state of American academia?
The story of this tawdry melodrama at Duke deserves a
book. Fortunately, it is about to get one.
K. C. Johnson, a professor of history at Brooklyn College,
has been providing a meticulous chronicle of the unfolding
scandal on his aptly named weblog “Durham-in-Wonderland.” In
September, Thomas Dunne will publish
Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the
Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case,
co-authored by Mr. Johnson and the journalist Stuart Taylor.
A lot of people have suffered because of the Duke farce. But
what of the Professor Bakers and Wahneema Lubianos? What of
the Group of 88? They will wrap themselves in the mantle of
“academic freedom” and proceed as if nothing had happened.
What a travesty.
