Newsweek reviews this week a new book-length chronicle of the Duke lacrosse rape allegations.
I particularly enjoyed the final paragraph, which describes why the case has been called a case of “academic McCarthyism”:
The authors make the Duke faculty look at once ridiculous and craven. For months, not one of the university’s nearly 500-member faculty of arts and sciences stood up to question the rush to judgment against the lacrosse team. So much for the ideal of the liberal-arts university where scholars debate openly and seek the truth. (“This book provides one interpretation,” says Duke spokesman John Burness.) The only group that shows any common sense in “Until Proven Innocent” is the student body. Aside from a few noisy activists who assumed the players were guilty, Duke undergrads mostly overlooked the political correctness of their professors.
