Bottum: Following Up the Duke Case

College is time for learning things, and there have been several lessons taught by the accusations of rape made against the Duke University lacrosse players. The first is not to go to Duke.

The school that likes to pride itself as the premier university of the South has, in fact, proved itself something like a cruise ship for pampered young profligates¯ Naked Dancers! , the school’s promotional material ought to read, All-Night Bacchanalias! All-Day Satyricon!

Except that Duke is also a cruise ship staffed by angry anarchist professors and captained by an administration that will throw its student-passengers overboard at the least hint of a storm. For $46,050 a year ( according to the university’s website ), Duke will apparently grant you hot-and-cold-running strippers, teachers who hate you, and an administration that trembles every time the wind blows.

You have only to read the latest defense motion to see just how completely the Duke lacrosse case has unraveled. So completely, in fact, that it’s hard to find any media types still willing to argue for it. The columnist Clarence Page made a convoluted claim this morning that the facts weren’t yet all in and the accuser deserved her day in court, but even Page devoted most of his column to the fact that the case has been run into the ground.

It’s only a matter of time¯weeks, probably¯before the last of the charges are dropped or dismissed. And the question then becomes one of who is going to get the blame.

The prosecutor in the case, Mike Nifong, is already lost. The North Carolina bar association has filed one set of charges against him for his handling of the case, with, reportedly, a second set coming soon to deal with the December revelations of his collusion with a DNA expert to suppress evidence. Prosecutors enjoy absolute immunity from civil suits, but when Nifong named himself chief investigator in the case, he assumed a police role¯which opens up the opportunity for the accused students to sue both Nifong and the city of Durham for massive damages.

Which leaves Duke University. The school is already beginning to suffer. Applications for early admission (the earliest statistics available) show a 20 percent decline compared with last year . The first lawsuit has been filed against the school , by a student whose professor is accused of deliberately giving F’s to the only two lacrosse players in her course. The local North Carolina press, which whipped itself into a frenzy attacking Duke last spring for allowing rich white lacrosse players to rape a poor black woman, is now whipping itself into a frenzy attacking Duke for failing to defend its accused students against obviously false charges .

Once the three charged students have been cleared, a flurry of lawsuits will come against the school and the professors who openly denounced the students. With the whole nation watching¯and now convinced the students were railroaded¯Duke seems likely to lose those cases badly. In truth, the school deserves to lose those cases, for it set up both ends of this nightmare: last spring’s outpouring of anger at race, class, and gender abuse, together with this winter’s outpouring of anger at the violation of the accused students’ rights.

But the question is what Duke¯and all the rest of America’s colleges¯will learn from it all. Sex and radical politics are supposed to fit together easily, but the Duke lacrosse case suggests that the casual hedonism of the nation’s campuses and a radicalized professoriate with real power cannot, in fact, live together. I’d just as soon lose them both. But one or the other has to change. It’s a good bet that most schools will see that protecting their students requires stripping power from the professors. A good start, but only half the lesson.