Nifong History But The Lynch Mob Still Thrives

June 19, 2007 -- "Mike Nifong is all but gone - resigned as Durham County district attorney and disbarred by the North Carolina Bar Association for his attempt to railroad three innocent Duke lacrosse players on rape charges.

But what about the other members of the lynch mob?

Like the Durham City Council, whose members charged that the Duke lacrosse team "has been a ticking time bomb that has not been dismantled." Or the area residents who picketed with "wanted" posters of all 46 team members and signs that read, "Don't be a fan of rapists."

And what's to be done about the most outrageous perpetrators of all?

Namely Duke's Gang of 88 - the faculty members (more than 10 percent of the entire staff) who signed a contemptible public statement that not only assumed the players' guilt but hailed the "collective noise" that led Nifong to file his dubious legal charges?

"What Does a Social Disaster Sound Like?" asked their manifesto, citing the purported attack as proof of the "racism, sexism, sexual violence and homophobia" on Duke's campus.

Even after the charges had been proven false, many of the signers remained unapologetic - insisting "the legal process will not resolve" the continuing problem of all those "isms" on campus.

Or the university's president, Richard Brodhead - who not only refused to stand by his own students, but canceled the lacrosse season, suspended the accused players and pressured the team's coach (a 16-year veteran) to resign?

Meanwhile, the rest of the Duke faculty - save for 17 courageous members of the economics department, who publicly disavowed the Gang of 88 - remained silent, afraid to speak out.

Yesterday, the university reached a financial settlement with the three falsely accused players, avoiding a lawsuit.

But no one has taken steps to remedy the cowardly school leadership that caved to the pressure of a politically radical faculty demanding that the legal rights of the accused be trampled on.

Sadly, what happened at Duke is typical of American academia these days.

That's been especially obvious of late at Columbia University - which, after months of hand-wringing, finally decided that a thuggish assault against a politically unpopular campus speaker deserved only the gentlest of wrist-slaps.

Indeed, it took an entire week before President Lee Bollinger acknowledged that seizing the stage to silence a speaker "does constitute a disruption" of free speech - and even then, he insisted that was only "my personal view." And this from a university president who is known as a specialist and scholar on First Amendment free-speech rights.

Of course, he'd earlier trampled on the rights of pro-Israel students who complained they were routinely harassed for their views by pro-Palestinian professors.

What's happened at Duke and Columbia constitutes just the latest examples of how the American academy has been turned into a giant P.C. playpen - where genuine academic debate and the exchange of ideas have long since given way to hard-left polemics and the rigid enforcement of leftist doctrine."

Well done. Now lets stop beating the same dead horse and get down to brass tacks. What do we do to fix it?