Legal Commentary

Stuart Taylor on Fresh Rot at Duke

By Kenneth Anderson

The estimable legal journalist Stuart Taylor, doing the job (along with blogger and historian KC Johnson) that few people are willing to take on, in or out of academia ? monitoring the madness.  This link won?t stay up permanently, but Stuart?s take on Duke?s latest effort not to learn from Duke?s mistakes is well worth reading.

You might think that a university whose students were victims of the most notorious fraudulent rape claim in recent history, and whose professors ? 88 of them ? signed an ad implicitly presuming guilt, and whose president came close to doing the same would have learned some lessons.

The facts are otherwise. They also suggest that Duke University?s ugly abuse in 2006 and 2007 of its now-exonerated lacrosse players ? white males accused by a black stripper and hounded by a mob hewing to political correctness ? reflects a disregard of due process and a bias against white males that infect much of academia.

In September, far from taking pains to protect its students from false rape charges, Duke adopted a revised ?sexual misconduct? policy that makes a mockery of due process and may well foster more false rape charges by rigging the disciplinary rules against the accused.

Meanwhile, none of the 88 guilt-presuming professors has publicly apologized. (Duke?s president, Richard Brodhead, did ? but too little and too late.) Many of the faculty signers ? a majority of whom are white ? have expressed pride in their rush to judgment. None was dismissed, demoted, or publicly rebuked. Two were glorified this month in Duke?s in-house organ as pioneers of ?diversity,? with no reference to their roles in signing the ad. Three others have won prestigious positions at Cornell, Vanderbilt, and the University of Chicago.

Full post as published by The Volokh Conspiracy on December 20, 2009 (boomark / email).