In the Land of Unintended Consequences, Part II

Many have said (including me), that the Duke Lacrosse scandal could have happened on any campus in the country. The ingredients are pretty simple. You need a group of rich, white, drunk male athletes to hire black strippers. One of the strippers has to cry rape. You also need a town DA who is going to prosecute regardless as to whether he can possibly get a conviction.

What major college doesn’t potentially have all of those ingredients?

But there is an aspect to this scandal that is unique to Duke that is starting to dominate the news right now. The culture wars, like some 80s rock bands that are best forgotten, have improbably made a comeback.

You have people on the right - parents, alumni and angry white male outsiders - decrying leftist faculty for their attitude toward athletics in general and toward the lacrosse players in particular. Just like the bad old days of the 80s, leftist faculty members are being heaped with verbal abuse. 88 faculty members have been condemned as vultures, a gang and for even having ties to that punching bag of Fox News, Bill Clinton.

On the other side, you have unrepentant leftist faculty decrying “blog hooligans” and maintaining that while the lacrosse players may be innocent, they are sleazy; for them issues of racism and sexism brought out by the scandal are very real at Duke and in the world.

Can’t we all just get along? Nope.

It may be that this revival of the culture wars could have happened in a lot of places. But Duke was primed for this. Given Duke’s development and decision-making, the Lacrosse Scandal can almost be seen as an inevitable train wreck.

Duke embarked on two major initiatives over the last 25 years that were partly incompatible. In the 1980s, it decided to pump up the humanities. In the 1990s, it decided to pump up scholarship athletics. The Duke Lacrosse scandal is partly an unintended outcome of those two initiatives.

I’d like to go a couple of decades back in time. This is a train wreck involving two trains moving very slowly.

In the 1980s, Duke had as a president someone who touted the “outrageous ambitions” of the university. Duke at the time was a good regional school with a Southern focus. President Terry Sanford wanted more. He wanted Duke to be a national university. He didn’t know exactly how to do it, so he went looking for a provost that did. He hired a very unusual candidate, Phillip Griffiths, a socially inept, reserved mathematics professor from Harvard with hardly any administrative experience.

An unlikely success story, Phillip Griffiths created the national reputation of Duke University. Some considered him a magician and a genius for doing the near impossible. He did it in eight years and then went on to Princeton.

The standard model for creating a national university is to raid other universities of prominent faculty. For the last 60 years, the focus of raiding other university has been in the sciences. But Duke couldn’t follow that model; it didn’t have the money. Science faculty are expensive. They need lab space. They need fancy equipment. They need research assistants. The start up costs for senior science professors is in the realm of seven figures. When Phillip Griffiths was provost, Duke had an endowment in the low nine figures. It was simply too poor to do what places like Stanford had done.

Griffiths came up with another strategy. He would make Duke a national center for the humanities. Humanities faculty members didn’t need big start up costs. If you offered them a good salary, you could raid them fairly easily. Plus in the 1980s, some humanities faculty members at major universities felt unappreciated and beaten up by the culture wars. At Duke they could come to a place where they would be the crown jewel of the Arts and Sciences.

Griffiths successfully raided humanities faculty across the country. And in short order, he raised the profile of the university. It was no longer just a university with a good medical school. It was a university with a good medical school and nationally visible scholarship in the humanities.

The only problem with this approach is that the humanities are dominated by far left politics and many of these star faculty members were very much on the political left. Duke had never had this level of leftist slant before. These professors weren’t the hang around the water cooler types who talked about the football game they saw on TV the other night. Many could care less about college athletics and some were openly dismissive. They were different. They tended to be urban. They tended to be Eastern. They tended to fit into the culture of the South and Durham poorly. Duke was an oasis for them.

That’s one train. I’ll talk about the other train on the track tomorrow. Yes, I’m greatly simplifying here and all of you Duke-heads out there who know this stuff and more are probably saying, but, but, but; write your own damn blog if you want to be more nuanced and fill in the details. ;)

Oh I note that Brodhead made another statement yesterday. From a PR standpoint, he's making too many statements as of late. A leader only has so much verbal capital and he needs to dole it out carefully. Otherwise his authority starts to diminish and he becomes known principally as a chatterbox. But my view is that it's all over for him come renewal time so it doesn't matter anyway.