Evan Thomas of Newsweek says Duke President Richard Brodhead and the Duke faculty don’t come off well in the K.C. Johnson/Stuart Taylor Jr. book Until Proven Innocent. The authors describe a meeting between the Duke captains and Brodhead, at which the captains admit there was a party but no assault or rape. Brodhead, say Johnson and Taylor, responded with tears in his eyes that the captains needed to understand how hard it had been for him:
Listening to Brodhead, Robert Ekstrand, a lawyer representing the captains and many of their teammates, “felt his blood starting to boil,” write Taylor and Johnson. “Here, he thought, is a comfortable university president wallowing in self-pity in front of four students who are in grave danger of being falsely indicted on charges of gang rape, punishable by decades in prison.”
As for the faculty, Evans notes:
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 sounds like a book full of truth. Can’t wait to read it.
