A Book in Need of An Editor
Stuart Rojstaczer
Review of Until Proven Innocent
By Stuart Taylor and KC Johnson

I'm very picky about the books that I like. Many times I'll read a glowing review of a book somewhere and after I'm finished reading the book myself will wonder, “What the hell was the reviewer thinking?” Sometimes the book has a good kernel of an idea and there is obviously a lot of work that has been done, but no one bothered to shape the book. If only there had been a decent editor, I think. There's a good book in here somewhere. That's my impression of Until Proven Innocent, the much talked about and somewhat widely read book about the Duke Lacrosse Affair written by Taylor and Johnson.

I am very sympathetic to the contents of this book and very familiar with the places and people mentioned. I taught at Duke for fifteen years. I'm well aware of and have been very public about its flaws. I've lived in Durham and in the neighborhood where the lacrosse players lived, Trinity Park. While I'm a critic of college athletics, the only lacrosse player I knew in a class of mine was a great kid and an asset to the classroom. I know many of the people mentioned in this book and like Taylor and Johnson think that a few of the humanities faculty are so far out on the political left that they are embarrassments. I'm quoted twice in this book and my quotes are used to reinforce the authors' opinions.

That all said, I just don't think that the book Until Proven Innocent is very good. The authors are often successful at describing in detail the actions of a rogue District Attorney and a gossip hungry press. But what is good about this book frequently gets muddied by hyperbole, demagoguery, tangents that reflect the authors' political agenda, and an occasional tin ear.

The authors have assembled a tremendous amount of information and many interviews about the Lacrosse Affair. What's particularly unique and valuable is that they apparently had open access to interview just about everyone on the side of the lacrosse team, players, coaches, lawyers, and parents. In contrast, their access to Duke was limited. And their access to the DA's office and the Durham Police Department was tiny.

Given that the information obtained is weighted heavily toward lacrosse team sources, the authors had two viable choices in constructing this book. They could have focused on the human drama associated with this case. What is it like for parents and families to have their children falsely accused? Such a book could have made a compelling and emotionally riveting story. But clearly that wasn't the interest of Taylor and Johnson in writing this book.

Instead, Taylor and Johnson have legal and political interests. These interests combined with all of the data and interviews could have made an interesting book as well. Taylor and Johnson could have played it straight. They had a lot of facts at their disposal. Cool recitation of those facts would have produced a far more devastating portrait of justice gone wrong than the approach used here: write a screed loaded with airbrushing, cheap shots, childish asides, and speculation on the motives of those Taylor and Johnson don't like. Taylor and Johnson have ruined a perfectly good story.

It's really a shame because it's obvious that the authors have the intelligence and material to write one hell of a book. Maybe that's why I'm so disappointed with the end product.

Lets talk about airbrushing. Yes, three young men were both wrongfully arrested by a corrupt and delusional DA and abandoned and vilified by their university. If they hadn't spent somewhere around five million dollars defending themselves, these men might well be in prison. But they aren't angels. They have no halos over their heads. And that is what Taylor and Johnson would lead you to believe. The lacrosse team consists of wonderful human beings and great students.

First off, the Duke lacrosse team did not have a distinguished academic record. As has been noted elsewhere, the team's average GPA (grade point average) exceeded 3.2. This GPA threshold might be something to crow about at Caltech. At Duke with its rampant grade inflation, it is nothing to be proud of. The GPA for undergraduates at Duke is 3.4. Graduating from Duke with a 3.2 GPA or less, something that was true for a large number of lacrosse players, would be an embarrassment in terms of class rank.

As students, lacrosse players tended to enroll in the softer classes at Duke, the ones with high GPAs and low workloads. At Duke, science classes have GPAs 0.4 below those of humanities classes with social science classes between the humanities and sciences in terms of grading. Lacrosse students weren't enrolling in physics and chemistry like the many premeds at Duke. And still they couldn't manage to have GPAs that matched the university’s average.

So no, they didn't work hard. But they sure did play hard. Actually they didn't play hard. They played stupid repeatedly. They drank and were cited for their drinking. And one of them was arrested - someone who according to Taylor and Johnson has no temper - for getting involved in a fight outside of a bar in Washington, DC.

The lacrosse players in this book are imbued with warm smiles, affability, and offbeat senses of humor. They are charming, strong, and honest individuals. While I'm sure they have many positive attributes and their parents and girlfriends love them, they undoubtedly have a less than savory side. Everybody does. With their consistent fawning, the authors lose credibility.

In contrast, no one on the opposite side gets any airbrushing. Instead, the authors decide to pile on gratuitous insults and black marks. One of the first pieces of extensive information we get on Durham's DA Nifong is that he cheated on his first wife many years ago. Now tell me, how does this bear on the subject at hand? What the authors are doing is dime-store novel foreshadowing. A good editor would have had the sense to throw this and other cheap tricks out.

The chief cop in the investigation gets the slapstick cameo of being stuck in a dorm room ceiling and making it sag. A reporter from the NY Times strangely gets savaged by the authors for living in suburban Connecticut. A professor who criticized the lacrosse players is described as a burn out by the authors. Upon what evidence do they make this claim? These pot shots make the authors seem both petulant and childish. They take away from what should be a very naturally compelling story.

Now given that many of the people being slapped around with gratuitous insults are less than admirable, maybe it's all OK in this age of rudeness we live in. But I don't think so. And not everyone subject to Taylor and Johnson's insults is unsavory. For example, the authors lambaste a Duke-commissioned external report by Bowen and Chambers as something akin to an inadvertent Saturday Night Live parody. William Bowen is perhaps the most respected leader, past or present, in higher education over the last forty years. There have been many weasels in positions in leadership in higher education; he is not one of them.

William Bowen's track record is impeccable. You may not agree with him on an issue, but he does not write inadvertent parodies. And not only do Taylor and Johnson swing wildly in condemning Bowen and Chambers' report but they get it wrong when they say that Duke leadership liked the report's contents; in fact, they disagreed with the report nearly as much as Taylor and Johnson.

There are other things that Taylor and Johnson get wrong as well. Most importantly, it's a central thesis of this book that political correctness drove decision making at Duke. Supposedly, the Board of Trustees and Duke's president cowered in the face of the powerful far left faculty. The authors just don't understand the politics of Duke. As someone who sat on many committees and the Academic Council and watched faculty governance at Duke in action, I know first hand that professors have very little power. Duke is very much a top down organization. The opinions of professors - far left in their politics or otherwise - matter very little to the Board of Trustees and President Brodhead.

Taylor and Johnson choose to make heinous villains out of the "Group of 88," the eighty-eight professors who signed a student newspaper ad decrying racism and sexism vis a vis the Lacrosse Affair. With regard to the “Group of 88,” Taylor and Johnson are engaging in demagoguery. Certainly there are some left-wing crackpots at Duke (and no doubt some right-wing crackpots). But there are nowhere near eighty-eight of them. These eighty-eight faculty members are not an organized group that thinks in lock step. They are simply signatories to an ad. And that ad - while insulting to the lacrosse players and their families - had no influence on substantive decision making at Duke. It was hardly noticed until Johnson and right wing columnists used it for political fodder.

Taylor and Johnson have made this molehill into a mountain to promote their political agenda, but there are far more appropriate examples of the corrosive nature of political correctness on the academy. The drama created by Taylor and Johnson related to this ad and the “Group of 88” may be believable to some; but it is fiction.

To their credit, the authors get quite a bit right. There is a good deal of insight into how the defense lawyers went about their work although the level of fawning over these lawyers rivals that of the fawning over the lacrosse players. For those interested in legal matters, I imagine that the details of how these lawyers fought off the potential disaster of having Durham's DA Nifong continue to serve as prosecutor would prove fascinating.

Why has this book received positive reviews even though it’s essentially a slapped together affair written on a tight deadline? I think the answer is that if you are sympathetic to the lacrosse players (you’d have to be truly twisted not to be sympathetic) and their ordeal, you look past the flaws of the book because basically the authors’ hearts are in the right place.

It’s worth noting that this book, despite many positive reviews and the national awareness of the Lacrosse Affair, has not sold particularly well. And I’ll speculate that the reason this is so is not because the book isn’t very good; badly written or edited books frequently make the bestseller lists. Rather, it’s because its subject matter is not the stuff that is in fashion right now. Books critical of higher education have not sold well in over fifteen years. It appears that when you’re a parent paying 50K a year to send your kid to college, you would rather not know about bad news like political correctness. It’s too depressing.

In addition, true crime books went out of fashion about twenty years ago. But I’ll make the claim that if the original story line – privileged rich college athletes rape poor black woman – had turned out to be true (thank god it wasn’t so) a well-researched book that followed that story would have been a top seller. Every good story needs a captivating villain. A tale where the villain is an overweight, middle-aged, small-town, career civil servant just can’t doesn’t command as much attention as one where the villains are rich preppy athletes from New York. I suspect that’s not only why this book has had modest sales, but it’s also why the press made the lacrosse players villains for as long as they did. Taylor and Johnson claim the press was motivated by political correctness. In my view, the motivation was simply to attract more readers and listeners, facts be damned.

It’s through no fault of theirs that Taylor and Johnson narrate a story that, while tragic, lacks broad appeal in today’s marketplace. Ultimately, Until Proven Innocent is a book written primarily for Dukies past and present, Carolinians, lawyers, legal junkies, and the segment of the country’s political right wing obsessed with left-wing bias in the academy.

In 2006, an emotionally troubled stripper and a rogue DA were able to bring national attention and unwarranted shame upon an entire city, a major university, college athletics, and a lacrosse team. Most importantly, they managed to make life a living hell for three innocent people and their families. Until Proven Innocent does provide valuable information about how this tragedy came to be. But it is flawed in its depictions. Had someone judiciously knocked out one hundred or so pages, this book just might shine.

And yes, I know this review is too long. It, like the book, could use an editor.