First, John Leo gives Duke President Richard Brodhead his annual Sheldon Award, which goes to the worst college president every year. The award looks a bit like an Oscar, which is a man with no face, but the Sheldon is a statuette of a man with no spine:
Because Michael Nifong made himself such a spectacular villain in the lacrosse case, Mr. Brodhead escaped without much criticism. But here is what Mr. Brodhead did: On hearing the first reports, he abruptly canceled the lacrosse season, suspended the two players named in the case, and fired the lacrosse coach of 16 years, giving him less than a day to get out.
This helped create the impression that the players were guilty. His long letter to the campus on April 20 did the same thing. He didn’t say the boys were guilty, but he talked passionately about the coercion and assault of women, the legacy of racism, and privilege and inequality — all of which fed the anger aimed at the lacrosse team.
Second, The Wall Street Journal‘s Dorothy Rabinowitz continues the theme of presidential spinelessness:
Duke President Richard Brodhead was doubtless disturbed by the charges and the plight of the accused athletes. But that didn’t prevent him from firing the lacrosse coach, in deference to the reigning hysteria–or treating the team members as though they merited shunning. For the most part, he kept his head down while the fires raged around him. His was, it should be said, not unusual behavior. The great consuming career goal of our college and university presidents–with the exception of oddities like Harvard’s Larry Summers–has for more than two decades been the same: to avoid any word or deed that might incur the wrath of their gender- and race-obsessed faculties and allied campus activists. University presidents once had higher ambitions.
Everyone keeps saying “we need to learn from this.” We’ll know if college and university boards of trustees learned anything from the Duke lacrosse incident as they fill the next generation of presidential vacancies.
