Duke and the Freedom of Speech
Tapscott: “It shouldn’t surprise or sadden me anymore to read about a once-noble university now acting as if the First Amendment was never adopted, but it still does. Remember the Duke lacrosse team outrage? Well, the players and their families are suing all of the responsible parties, including Duke.”
Paul Mirengoff explains:
Many of you probably know that 38 members of the 2006 Duke lacrosse team have filed a civil suit against Duke University, its president Richard Brodhead (yes, he’s still Duke’s president), the city of Durham, and others associated with the outrageous behavior directed at team members in connection with the bogus rape allegations. The plaintiffs have established a web site that presents information about the case. It posts pleadings in the case and provides links to a press release about the case, certain media reports, and certain blogs operated by third parties.
Duke’s lawyers, among whom are Clinton administration stalwarts Jamie Gorelick and Seth Waxman, apparently have no such qualms. They seek an order declaring, among other things, that the plaintiffs’ website violates local rules against extrajudicial attorney statements. Duke acknowledges that the material on the website either quotes or closely paraphrases the allegations contained in the plaintiffs’ complaint. Duke also concedes that the material thus falls within the safe harbor provided by the local rules for attorney comments that convey information in a public record. However, Duke takes the position that the statements nonetheless violate the local rules because they are “incendiary.”
Duke has no basis for reading into the local rule an exception for incendiary statements (or, in this case, statements it simply doesn’t like). Moreover, such an exception likely would be unconstitutionally vague.
What we see here, then, is an attempt by an American university to limit the freedom of speech. And that’s a serious issue: Duke is making itself look increasingly worse.
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Duke, and the academic Jacobins who control the university, do not believe in the Constitution, or the First Amendment to it. They believe that they are a law unto themselves. The university allowed an unsubstantiated and easily disproven charge by an emotionally disturbed complaining witness to move ahead. It ignored evidence that the charge was a hoax. Then Duke’s administration completely failed to live up to its responsibilities to protect the constitutional rights of its students. Instead, members of the faculty and administration appear to have actively worked with the perpetrators of the frame to engage in the persecution of the players for political reasons. No one at Duke university has every been held accountable for the failure to protect the rights and personal safety of the students, or their constitutional rights to a fair and impartial trial,or their rights to receive the education they and their parents were paying for. No one has been held accountable for the apparent use of university money for wanted posters maligning the student athletes, for faculty engaging in grade retaliation, or publicly humiliating the students in class. No one has been disciplined, and no one has been publicly identified with these failures by Duke University. What little is known has come out from the legal process. Because the university has failed to do the correct thing for its students, many students and their families are now suing Duke. I believe them when they say it is not about the money, it is about the truth. I suspect the truth which will come out in the trial is that the university is controlled by a group of left wing pseudo intellectuals, a collection of Marxists and adherents to various other discredited left of center philosophies including identity politics. Identity politics, in the form found in ethnic and gender studies programs at colleges and universities seems especially corrosive of intellectual freedom and personal liberty. Just ask any member of the 2006 Duke Lacrosse team.
My best wishes for success go to the team members and their families. I hope you sue Duke out of its billions of endowment dollars. Then maybe academics will begin to seriously consider behaving ethically and legally. It is not likely to happen until these people at Duke are personally hurt. Hurt badly. As in bankrupted, and reduced to selling pencils on street corners sort of hurt. Then, maybe, we will see responsible faculty take control of their campuses again.
At this point, the Jacobins are controlling the campus at Duke, and at Harvard, and elsewhere. Fortunately, they do not have access to a guillotine, and it is probable that none of the professors and graduates of ethnic and gender studies programs have enough wood and metal shop skills to build one.
That’s actually quite a good comparison: Jacobins. They’re like modern Jacobins, aren’t they?