Duke Lacrosse Scandal

Michael Barone: Feds crack down on campus flirting, sex jokes

These reflections are inspired by a seemingly innocuous 19-page letter on April 4 from the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights to colleges and universities. The letter was given prominence by Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which has done yeoman work opposing restrictive speech codes issued by colleges and universities.

But more often they involve alleged offenses defined in vague terms and depending often on subjective factors. Lukianoff notes that campus definitions of sexual harassment include "humor and jokes about sex in general that make someone feel uncomfortable" (University of California at Berkeley), "unwelcome sexual flirtations and inappropriate putdowns of individual persons or classes of people" (Iowa State University) or "elevator eyes" (Murray State University in Kentucky).

Given the prevailing attitudes among faculty and university administrators, it's not easy to guess who will be the target of most such proceedings. You only have to remember how rapidly and readily top administrators and dozens of faculty members were ready to castigate as guilty of rape the Duke lacrosse players who, as North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper concluded, were absolutely innocent.

As Lukianoff points out, OCR had other alternatives. The Supreme Court in a 1999 case defined sexual harassment as conduct "so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive, and that so undermines and detracts from the victims' educational experience, that the victim-students are effectively denied equal access to an institution's resources and opportunities." In other words, more than a couple of tasteless jokes or a moment of elevator eyes.

I wonder whether there is some connection between this and the dwindling percentage of men who enroll in and graduate from college. Are we allowing – and encouraging – our university administrators to create an atmosphere so unwelcoming and hostile to males that we are missing out on the contributions they could make with a college or graduate degree?

When I was growing up, it was widely believed that colleges and universities were the part of our society with the widest scope for free expression and free speech. In the conformist America of the 1950s, the thinking ran, few people dared to say anything that went beyond a broad consensus. But on campus, anyone could say anything he liked.

Today, we live in an America with enormous cultural variety in which very few things are considered universally verboten. But on campus it's different. There, saying something considerably milder than some of the double entendres you heard in cable news coverage of the Anthony Weiner scandal can get you into big trouble.

The Duke Lacrosse Scandal Revisited: Five Years Later - Archives

On April 18, 2011, Crystal Mangum was indicted for murder in the stabbing death of her boyfriend Reginald Daye. This case isn’t Mangum’s first brush with the law. In 2010, she was convicted of a misdemeanor for setting fire to her house while her three children were inside.

But in Mangum’s most famous—or should I say, infamous—interaction with the criminal justice system, she claimed to be the “victim.”

Mangum, who is black, accused three white lacrosse players from Duke University of raping her at an off-campus party in March 2006, a fact that’s noted in nearly every article on her current legal predicament.

The charges against the players were eventually dropped in April 2007 after an investigation by the North Carolina Attorney General’s Office uncovered prosecutorial misconduct and a lack of evidence to support Mangum’s accusations.  

Mike Nifong , the district attorney responsible for the case, resigned and was disbarred. However, Mangum was never charged over the false accusations.

During the 13 months the case was active, the national media ran full tilt with the story.  It was covered in newspapers such as the New York Times and Los Angeles Times; magazines such as Newsweek and Rolling Stone; , blogs and cable news. Even the venerable 60 Minutes did several segments on it.

The consensus now seems to be that much of this coverage represented a rush to judgment of the players and was unfair and unprofessional. (But at least one journalist, Andrew Cohen of the Washington Post , thought the coverage was slanted in favor of the players.)

I won’t rehash all of the mistakes various media entities made in covering what’s often simply referred to as the Duke lacrosse scandal. (The American Journalism Review did a wonderful job of reviewing and analyzing the media feeding frenzy that descended on Duke and the accused players.) But the missteps broadly occurred in two areas: the initial framing of the case and the response to the dropping of the charges.

Everything takes place in a context, which is relevant to understanding the true nature of events. Crime is no different. For example, a man who robbed a store to fund his drug habit is guilty of the same crime as a man who lost his job and so robbed the same store to feed his family.

But because the context of each of these crimes is very different, the media will appropriately cover each differently.

Until Proven Innocent, Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case

It's Not About the Truth, The Untold Story of the Duke Lacrosse Case and the Lives It Shattered

The Duke Lacrosse Case, A Documentary History and Analysis of the Modern Scottsboro

Institutional Failures, Duke Lacrosse, Universities, the Media, and the Legal System

Justice, Crime, and Ethics