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Apr 17, 2006

Duke News


by Cliopatria


There aren't too many people who have come out of the current Duke controversy looking good, but there are two that have performed about as well as possible, it seems to me, under current circumstances. The first is the editor (and by extension, the reporters) of the Duke student newspaper, the Chronicle, whose coverage has been first-rate. As the Crimson demonstrated last spring during the Summers controversy, student newspapers with talented reporters can actually outperform the regular media on campus stories.

The second is Duke's president, Richard Brodhead. He--quite appropriately, it seems to me--suspended and then cancelled the lacrosse season; based on the most benign interpretations of their actions, many of the lacrosse players were guilty of conduct unbecoming university students and gravely embarrassing the school. He's reached out to students and administrators at NCCU. At the same time, he's avoided any rush to judgment--unlike a handful of Duke professors, led by Afro-Am studies professor Houston Baker, who essentially advocated dismissing the lacrosse students from school. (Baker, alas, looks mild compared to Jesse Jackson, who yesterday promised that the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition would pay the accuser's tuition, even if her story proved false.)

That said, I was somewhat troubled by Brodhead's rather weak response to events of last Thursday. In the latest in what has seemed a poorly managed investigation, the Durham police gained entry, without warrants and apparently without the assistance of the Duke police, to Duke dorms and attempted to interrogate several lacrosse players, who all sides knew had lawyers. When asked about the matter Friday, Brodhead said he didn't know enough about the issue to comment, and hasn't said anything since.

While Brodhead is obviously in a very difficult position, if I were a Duke parent, I would have expected more from him on this matter. From the standpoint of legal ethics, the police were clearly in the wrong; pragmatically, the DNA and photo evidence of the past week, while not exonerating the players, substantially boosted their presumption of innocence. In an era of speech codes, when universities often improperly act in loco parentis, there are times when administrators ought to act in loco parentis. Police offers attempting to gain access to dorms to question students without their lawyers' presence is one such instance.


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Robert KC Johnson - 4/17/2006

I agree completely. As I said in the post, I really wouldn't want to be in Brodhead's shoes here.

The distinction between off-campus and on-campus strikes me as important in this aspect of the story. There was one additional point that very much troubled me (assuming media reports are correct; the police didn't challenge this): rather than going to campus security and asking to be let into the dorms, the police waited outside the dorm entries until a student arrived, and then gained access when the student used his card-swipe. That sort of behavior suggests the police knew what they were doing wasn't exactly legitimate, and would have strengthened the grounds on which Brodhead could have protested.

Ralph E. Luker - 4/17/2006

On the whole, what you've said seems about right to me, KC. At the same time, it also seems to me that the proper relationship of off-campus, local police to a resident student community has become fairly murky, especially as campuses have come to regard themselves as havens in which activity that is locally or, even, nationally, illegal is tolerated by college or university officials and police who know very well that it is going on. Drug use, of course, would be the most obvious example. But I suspect that there are others, aided and abetted by the claim that colleges must be safe spaces for such activity.