Legal Commentary

By now, everyone has heard about the "senior thesis" in "horizontal academics" that a 2010 Duke grad wrote as joke, a spoof thesis presentation describing the performance of thirteen Duke student-athletes (seven of them happened to be lacrosse players) with whom she had sex during her time in school. The New York Times got in on the story today, talking about embarrassed and weary the campus is over another scandal.

I have Duke lacrosse on the brain right now. So I was disappointed, although not surprised, that The Times mentioned the now-almost-five-year-old scandal involving false sexual-assault accusations against the lacrosse players. Much as I was not surprised that everyone talked about the Duke lacrosse scandal in covering the murder of Yeardley Love, a UVa lacrosse player, allegedly by her UVa lacrosse-player former boyfriend.

Will Duke lacrosse ever cease to be a reference point for salacious behavior (I cannot call this 'bad' behavior, because having consensual sex with a number of different people is not implicitly bad behavior and, frankly, neither is talking about it) involving Duke University and/or lacrosse? The seven lacrosse players mentioned in the "thesis" certainly did nothing close to bad or even inappropriate (I'm shocked, shocked, to find that male college students have consensual sex with women, often after an evening of drinking). Why would the paper even mention, in connection with them, an old scandal (none of the current players even were on campus in 2006) involving false accusations of criminal misconduct by a corrupt prosecutor and angry faculty? Even if you believe (as some do) that the lacrosse players five years ago were in the wrong for hiring a stripper, the current still situation still does not come close to that.

Interestingly, according to The Times, this is not the first time such an "academic" study has gone public. In 1977, two female M.I.T. students published "The Consumer Guide to M.I.T. Men," a "study" of the performance of 36 male M.I.T. students, in an alternative campus paper; the women were placed on academic probation for ten months. Naturally, The Times draws the wrong lesson from that. It concludes that this is all so much worse in the internet age ("Information, of course, has warped to a new dimension since then"), rather than that we have come a long enough way such that women no longer are punished (at least not formally, although one female student broached the subject of the school stripping the woman's degree) for asserting sexual freedom.