Stuart Taylor's Stinging Indictment of Academe

Stuart Taylor, co-author of Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case, which remains the definite telling of the Duke lacrosse team phony rape story, takes a look at the state of higher education at Duke and the country as a whole. He doesn't like what he sees:

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. ...

Go read the whole thing.

Comments

[JFP]

I think you want to say "definitive" rather than "definite."

[T. Shaw]

I bet every one of the useless POS's (PhD in pre-columbian lesbian poetry in Meso-America; or two MA's and a PhD in I.hate.America) voted for the worst president in American history.

I didn't need more proof that, outside nirvana of the college campus, soft-bullcrap-"discipline" prof's are mere idiots. I'd be astounded if any can balance a check book or do a tax return.

[Jeffersonian]

To the contrary, I think everyone has learned some very clear lessons here, specifically that there is no price to be paid for snapping into lockstep with the hard Left and that much good can flow to one's career for doing so.

[Steven Taylor]

None was dismissed, demoted, or publicly rebuked

I can certainly see that the deserved to be publicly rebuked, but fired or demoted?

[Fen]

What else do you expect from the Fake But Accurate crowd.

And I wonder how many signed onto the petition that claimed Clinton's sexual harasment [Jones], sexual discrimination [Lewinsky] and sexual assault [Wiley] was "just about sex".

[Bill Hawks]

What alarms me is the executive culture dominating these institutions and the relatively poor quality of individual holding the reigns of power. The abuse and contempt for due process is one thing, the preservation of those in authority protecting those who practice such presents the larger problem. Whether one looks the behind the curtain of the AGW grant racketeering, the Dartmouth scandal or the near-hysterical irony which led to the firing of Mike Leach at Texas Tech this week, we find the sepsis commonplace and unapologetically well established.

The time has come to confront university executives with the derision deserved. These are the floaters that survive the repeated flushings of academic politics. Time to send them on their way.

[William Ayers]

Evan Thomas said about the Duke case - "The narrative was right, but the facts were wrong"

[Cubs_Fan]

For a White liberal, what better way to establish your liberal bonafides than to rail against the injustices of "Whitey". Especially when the process involves a Black "victim". So you throw a bunch of affluent White kids to the wolves, who you figure will hire high-paid defense attorneys to get them acquitted.

That's when the fun begins, because the recipe for 24/7 agitprop would be for the lacrosse players to be acquitted. Then the White privilege system would also be put on trial.

However, something happened along the way. The boys were innocent, the DA got disbarred, and the school coughed up mucho dinero to settle the suit.

I have always had qualified respect for people in academia who immersed themselves in the "soft subjects" that allowed them to always be on the verge of throwing a tantrum. Sometimes, having an 8-6 gig where you have to produce quantifiable results like running a plant or business unit makes one more rational and less histrionic.