While we Cornell students were on vacation, the country watched the slow disintegration of the rape charges against the three Duke University lacrosse players. First came the revelation that the prosecutor, Michael Nifong, had asked a DNA testing lab to conceal exculpatory evidence from the defendants. Two weeks later, the North Carolina State Bar filed ethics charges against Nifong, accusing him of “conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation.” Last week, it came out that the accuser has almost completely revised her story, altering the names and descriptions of her supposed attackers, and also changing the time and nature of the assault. Law professor and victim’s rights advocate Susan Estrich summarized the new filings succinctly: the accuser “will be an admitted liar of the worst sort the moment she opens her mouth.”
The case has attracted national attention. Newspapers as far afield as San Diego have editorialized against the prosecution, or persecution, of the athletes. The Washington Post, the Rocky Mountain News, the New York Daily News, and a dozen other major papers have all condemned the way the case has been handled. While most of the country has reacted with horror to the way the accused students have been treated, many on the Duke faculty had a quite different reaction. Their comments about the case reveal some unwelcome truths about university faculty and how they sometimes view their students.
The rape charges, from the beginning, rested solely on the word of the accuser. There was no medical evidence of trauma, no DNA evidence and no corroborating witnesses, when all three would have been present had the accuser been telling the truth. Despite this significant lack of evidence, the initial reaction from many quarters was certainty that the accuser was being truthful, and that the lacrosse players were beasts. After all, “everybody knows” that student athletes are commonly would-be rapists. It was merely a matter of finding out which players did the deed, and there was an intensive and ugly campaign by some in the Duke community to pressure lacrosse players into “confessing.” Players were accused of covering up for rapists, taunted on their way to class and otherwise made to feel miserable for not confessing to a crime that never happened. There have been credible allegations of players wrongly given Fs by a professor who had previously accused them in writing of being accomplices to rape; one of the players is suing, and so we’ll likely be hearing more about this.
At the end of March, Duke English professor Houston Baker sent his university an open letter containing the following gem of racialist rhetoric: “The lacrosse team — 15 of whom have faced misdemeanor charges for drunken misbehavior in the past three years — may well feel they can claim innocence and sport their disgraced jerseys on campus, safe under the cover of silent whiteness. But where is the black woman who their violence and raucous witness injured for life? Will she ever sleep well again?” I cannot comment on the sleeping patterns of the accuser, but Professor Baker is guilty of a grotesque rush to judgment. Sometimes white people — even athletes — are actually innocent.
As the initial accusations fell apart, a new theme has become prominent: denouncing the Lacrosse team for drinking and hiring strippers, rather than for sexual assault. In a public email, Professor Alex Rosenberg expressed his horror that the lacrosse team “felt the need to purchase sexual titillation to go along with under-age illegal alcoholic consumption.” A number of other faculty members have made similar statements. This affected loathing for underage drinking and sexual titillation — what many at Cornell would describe as a well-spent weekend — rings hollow given the near-universal administrative toleration of drinking and debauchery on college campuses. It seems far more likely that the faculty in question “know” the lacrosse team is guilty of something, and drinking is the residual charge when all the truly significant accusations have been disproved. This studied outrage calls to mind that scene in Casablanca when the Vichy police chief (played by Claude Raines) announces that he is “shocked, shocked” to find illegal gambling going on, and is then given his winnings for the evening.
In March, professors Rosenberg and Baker both signed the statement of the so-called “group of 88”, denouncing white racism, and thanking the protesters, who were busily demonizing the lacrosse team for a crime that evidently never happened, for “not waiting” for the legal process. Now that it is clear that the players were innocent, they are owed an apology, not a further accusation. To say “well, you’re not a rapist, but you drink, so you deserved to be taunted, arrested, accused of rape and removed from school,” is not merely inadequate, but scandalous. The arrests of lacrosse players based on minimal evidence has a disturbing “round up the usual suspects” feel; this case likely would not have gone forward except that “everybody knows” athletes do things like this. It is disgraceful that many members of the Duke faculty encouraged this rush to judgment.
“Innocent until proven guilty” is a wise principle of justice, as applicable outside the courtroom as inside. Many members of the Duke University faculty have displayed a dismaying tendency to jump to conclusions, conclusions motivated by an aversion to athletes that borders on prejudice. This tendency is especially troubling given that university faculty ought to possess a healthy skepticism, and a capacity for evaluating evidence.
Last week, Nifong bowed to public pressure and stepped down from the case, the fate of which will now be determined by the North Carolina State Attorney General. Nifong may soon find himself viewing a courtroom from the unwelcome viewpoint of the defendant’s table. One hopes he will be subject to a fairer process than he subjected the Duke lacrosse players to.
Ari Rabkin is a graduate student in Computer Science. He can be contacted at asr32@cornell.edu [1]. Between the Lines appears Thursdays.
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[1] mailto:asr32@cornell.edu