This is their story.
This is the story of professors who tried to listen to their students and sparked a shouting match that overpowered any original statement.
This is the story of how an 832-word advertisement in a student newspaper sparked thousands of vitriolic, misogynist and racist e-mails and became a national media spectacle.
This is the story of how faculty received phone calls in the middle of the night, endured mail fraud and overcame death threats for speaking out.
Many view the "Group of 88"--as the signatories were eventually dubbed by bloggers--as a symbol of the community prejudging the lacrosse team. Of the out-of-touch ideals of academia. Of hate.
They have been accused of damaging the very same campus culture they intended to address, of forcing President Richard Brodhead to cancel the remaining games of the lacrosse season, of spurring District Attorney Mike Nifong to indict.
How did it reach this point?
"When you take a political stance, this is what happens sometimes-people resist that," says Diane Nelson, associate professor of cultural anthropology. "None of us want pity."
"I, for one, did not think through all of the unintended consequences, nor did I believe almost a year later it would be dissected in the Chronicle of Higher Education and the subject of such acrimony," says Lee Baker, another associate professor of cultural of anthropology and chair of the Arts and Sciences Council.
"The underlying issues about heavy drinking, the partying culture, the attitudes toward women and the racial divisions on campus and between the University and many people in the town, are by no means unique to Duke," Professor of Philosophy David Wong says. "But they raise questions as to who we are as a university community."
This is the story of how an attempt to address a perceived social disaster turned into a real disaster.
It's easy to forget how different the campus climate was when 88 professors said they were listening.
Although the party occurred March 13, the community first heard that three members of the lacrosse team allegedly raped, choked and sodimized a black stripper when District Attorney Mike Nifong forced 46 of the 47 lacrosse players to submit to photographs and provide DNA evidence March 23rd.
"I am convinced that there was a rape," Nifong said.
Four protests ensued during the next 48 hours, each attracting hundreds of students, professors and community members. Demonstrators at one rally, which was intended to be a "wake-up call" to raise awareness about sexual assault, held signs saying "You can't rape and run" and chanted, "It's Sunday morning, time to confess."
Professor Pedro Lasch, one of the signatories of the ad and associate professor of art, art history and visual studies, recently condemned the posters that implied guilt.
"It was not unthinkable that it might have happened," Lasch says, noting that this does not mean that he has ever assumed the players were guilty. "I knew this was, whether it happened or not, not the issue here. The overall context of the party in the lager social structure-not just in the Duke-Durham relationship but in the national scene-was not a good picture."
Professor Joe Harris, associate professor of English, says he became concerned as details about the party, the threatening e-mail-which he later learned was a takeoff on the movie American Psycho-and a destructive campus culture came to light.
"When I read about the lacrosse party, I was not surprised to hear that there was heavy drinking-that had been well-reported. I was surprised to hear that strippers had been hired," Harris says. "What I heard was [that] that sort of thing happens all the time. Strippers get hired all the time. Depending on who you talk to, the racial climate could be very volatile. When I heard that these events were common, I grew more concerned."
Nelson says students came to her expressing deep concerns about the campus climate. "Everyone was overwhelmed with trying to deal with the press, deal with students-none of us knew what was happening. At the same time, all that other pretty sordid history about the team was revealed. All that stuff came down together," Nelson says. "Professors wondered how we can support our students who are really feeling this."
The African and African-American Studies department took the initiative in writing what later became known as The Social Disaster advertisement. The final product, which Lasch says was a group effort among many of those who signed it, posed the question, "What does a social disaster sound like?"
A statement from the signatories surrounded student quotes about campus culture. Several phrases have particularly drawn the ire of bloggers and those that criticize the Group of 88.
"These students are shouting and whispering about what happened to this young woman and to themselves," the advertisement stated. "The students know that the disaster didn't begin on March 13th and won't end with what the police say or the court decides. Like all disasters, this one has a history.... To the students speaking individually and to the protestors making collective noise, thank you for not waiting and for making yourselves heard."
Anonymous student quotes, half of which were said before the alleged incident occurred, filled the remaining space.
"This is not a different experience for us here at Duke University," one read. "We go to class with racist classmates; we go to gym with people who are racists.... It's part of the experience."
Lasch says these concerns are common among minority students at Duke.
Harris adds that even if these issues existed only in the minds of a few, they should still be discussed. "How many such comments have to be uttered before you're concerned? There are a dozen such comments on the ad alone. That seems, to me, to be worth taking action on, in and of itself," he says. "I don't understand the line of thought that says, 'Well, if it's not there a whole lot, we don't need to worry about it.' If it's there, we need to worry."
The final draft was forwarded by e-mail to several departments and listservs. Professors had a short window to add their signatures to the document. "I had to tell them in six hours if I wanted to sign it," Nelson remembers. Associate Professor of AAAS Wahneema Lubiano-who was heavily involved in penning the ad's first draft-says the whole process lasted around 48 hours.
"The idea that we sat around and plotted, 'In what way can we most egregiously hurt the University?' doesn't seem to be how I remember what happened," Nelson says.
The advertisement had different meanings to different professors. "I'm not sure there is such a thing as an original meaning to a text," Harris says. "Eighty-eight people signed on to the text, and I think we had 88 reasons for doing so."
Harris was one of a number of professors who first saw the ad in the paper and wanted to add their names after reading it.
"I think you sign on to what you see as the general intent of such an ad. I did not read the ad as to coming to any judgment in the case," Harris says. "Would I have written the prose differently? Perhaps."
Harris added that there seems to be a misconception that these 88 faculty are united. "It is not a coherent group," Harris says. "There has never been a meeting of the Group of 88. My guess is that more than half of the 88 don't know the other half."
The advertisement ran in a full-page spread in The Chronicle April 6th-the day after Brodhead announced he set up five committees to investigate campus culture, cancelled the rest of the team's season, and that lacrosse coach Mike Pressler resigned.
There were no e-mails, no threats, no hate. Seemingly little discussion.
At first.
The advertisement, however, did not go unnoticed among members of the lacrosse team.
"The lawyers see this, and they're like, 'Oh my God. What were they thinking?' I sort of felt the same way," says Tony McDevitt, one of the team's three senior captains. "You've got to remember, during that time the most important thing was, 'What's going on with this case?' We weren't necessarily worried about Duke faculty."
At the time, McDevitt was enrolled in a class taught by a signatory of the statement. He says he never talked to his professor about the advertisement, and it would have been awkward to do so.
"It definitely crosses your mind. 'Oh jeez, my teacher thinks this way, and I have her in a class or I have him in a class.' It crosses your mind, but it kind of blows by, and you try not to think about that. You worry about what you can control, and that's writing your papers, taking your tests, studying, things like that," McDevitt says.
Ed Douglas, another of the team's captains, echoed McDevitt's thoughts. Although he noted the advertisement addressed deep cultural concerns, Douglas said it was "unsettling" at the time.
"Ideas of marginalization or discrimination on campus, issues of race and class and gender, are extremely important, not only at Duke but in our community and broader society," Douglas says. "So in that sense, looking back, I had a great appreciation for people wanting to address those issues. But I think it's sort of a problem when you use specific individuals or a specific case as the lens through which we're going to view all these issues-especially when a lot of the facts weren't known at the time."
Signatories said they never meant to hurt the players. "The lacrosse players' voices were being heard. our sense was that these other students who have an equal right to be heard were not at that moment," Nelson says.
The media largely ignored the advertisement when it was originally published. Nearly one week later, The Chronicle sharply condemned the statement in a staff editorial. "This is but one example of the instances of radical, inflammatory discourse that obscures what should be our true aim: reasonable discussion," The Chronicle stated.
KC Johnson began addressing the statement in his blog "Durham-in-Wonderland" on April 23rd and in the online newspaper Inside Higher Ed on May 1st.
"The public silence of most Duke professors allowed the group of 88 to become, in essence, the voice of the faculty," Johnson writes in an Inside Higher Ed commentary. "To date, the 88 faculty members who claimed to be 'listening' to Duke students have given no indication of listening to those undergraduates concerned about the local authorities' unusual interpretation of the spirit of due process." The editorial also states that the advertisement contributed to the feeding frenzy that led Nifong to indict two players.
Signatories have claimed their words have been misinterpreted and misused.
"People commenting on the ad outside the University are constantly obliterating it," Lasch says. "They want to present it as if it is our text, but we wanted to make sure students are heard. They erased the voice of the students in our ad.... 'What happened to this young woman' is the only moment in the whole text that you could, with an ethical standpoint and intelligence, say that we were implying something. That's what the bloggers are claiming. That is the place. But at the same time she was at the party-it was not a nice picture.... I don't think rape is the conclusion. We were talking about the whole night."
After the blogosphere picked up on the ad, professors each received hundreds of anonymous mass e-mails, most of which were racist, misogynistic and deeply personal profanity-laced diatribes. E-mail campaigns were targeted at specific, mostly African-American individuals, who received thousands of "ugly" e-mails.
Similar postings--but lacking the profanity in some cases--were placed on message boards on the internet. "Where does that anger come from? What is at stake for the people that sit there and type it up?" Nelson asks.
"I don't think it's worth responding to the bloggers' e-mails because they wanted [the discussion] to stop," Lasch adds. "They wanted all those questions, all those debates, all those discussions to stop right there. 'It was all a fabrication, you are making it all up,' they say. It's not true! And to say that is just utter self-deception."
The mainstream media has also contributed to the harassment. An employee of The O'Reilly Factor visited Baker's house early on a Saturday morning. "I was really caught off guard," Baker says. "I had not had my coffee, and the sun was in my eyes. Once I sort of woke up and figured out what was really going on, I said repeatedly that we did not rush to judgment and presumed that they were innocent.. They only aired me mumbling something unintelligible."
In the segment that eventually aired, Bill O'Reilly called the Group of 88 irresponsible.
The professors do not really understand the outpouring of anger. One cited a conspiracy. Another cited the misinterpretation in the media. They all hope the hatred will subside, for Duke's and their own sakes.
"The ad is a small thing that pulls together aspects of power," Nelson says. "It does this because of what it says: 'This is not this incident. The incident is possible because of longer histories-about Duke, about gender, about race. They can blame all these things on particular people.... This anger just overshoots the ad. There is something else there."
Nelson adds that most of the responses on campus have been full of praise. "Just the other day, a student came up to me and said, 'You were defending us, and now you are taking the heat.' I almost started crying," she says. "If anyone can take the heat, we can. We have a more secure position than a student. That is what we were doing with the advertisement."
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