The Duke Faculty and Administration Damaged the Intellectual Foundations of Higher Education
Mises Wire
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William L. Anderson
Duke University is perhaps best known for its very successful men’s basketball program, which is always ranked each year among the best collegiate teams. Unfortunately, a number of Duke faculty members 20 years ago, along with its president, board chairman, and other Duke administrators encouraged a corrupt district attorney to file false rape, kidnapping, and sexual assault charges against three members of its highly-ranked lacrosse team and did everything possible to try to prop up his case.
As I pointed out last month, the lacrosse case exposed lies and corruption with the local Durham, North Carolina, police department, the district attorney’s office, and the establishment news media, but perhaps the biggest offender besides Durham County D.A. Michael Nifong was Duke University itself. In today’s article, we look at some of the more outrageous actions that faculty and administrators took to encourage Nifong to pursue charges that obviously were false.
Duke Moves to the Hard Left
As an academically elite university, Duke’s leadership sought to raise its profile to compete with the Ivies, Stanford, Northwestern, and other prestigious institutions. But, as KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor explained in Until Proven Innocent, Duke’s leadership decided to build up its faculty not with scholars in the science fields, since that also would have required huge capital investments in labs and other research facilities. Instead, Duke decided to bolster departments in what one might call identity studies, including African Studies, Women’s Studies, Cultural Anthropology, and other areas of academics that revolved around hiring faculty members who doubled as social activists.
https://mises.org/mises-wire/duke-faculty-and-administration-damaged-intellectual-foundations-higher-education
