Fact Checker: The story of the University’s unorthodox critic

Ed Rickards is not a morning person, so he prefers not to be bothered before noon. He writes late at night next to an ice-cold bottle of water on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where he lives. But when he says he lives there he doesn’t mean it in the sense most people do. Rickards spends more than 180 days each year out of the state in part to avoid the city’s high income taxes, and he rents his apartment of 38 years instead of buying it because rent control laws keep the price low. He likes knowing what the rules are and using them to his advantage.

Decades after graduating from Duke in 1963 with a bachelor’s degree and a law degree in 1966, Rickards is now Fact Checker, the author of an increasingly popular blog that focuses on the governance of Duke and the scandals that occur on the University’s campus. Once the editor of The Chronicle, he maintains a connection to the paper as an online commenter under the Fact Checker name. He does not think highly of Duke’s administration and frequently writes about what he perceives as the latest gaffes of people like President Richard Brodhead and Michael Schoenfeld, vice president of public affairs and government relations. It is safe to say the administration thinks little of his work, though Brodhead, Schoenfeld and Provost Peter Lange all declined to comment on Rickards publicly.

“He continually urges more transparency from the administration in making decisions that affect the various stakeholders and also urges more consultation with those groups or their representatives,” said John Johnston, a former law professor who taught Rickards and has kept in contact with him ever since.

After graduating from the School of Law, Rickards briefly worked for a private equity firm but found the work so dull that he sent a telegram notifying his bosses of his resignation. He never returned. “There was no point in going back or giving them two weeks notice,” he said. “I wasn’t doing anything.” Instead, he took a job at the Associated Press in New York City, where he saw that the best reporters were able to dictate their stories over the phone from the field. He later worked at CBS, NBC and ABC but said he owes his ability to write more than 100 words per minute to the AP.

Rickards is transitioning to retirement, though he works part-time as a private consultant, and he now focuses much of his efforts on covering news at Duke from afar. The Fact Checker blog does not adhere to the same journalistic standards as the news organizations at which he worked—nor does Rickards think that others should expect it to. Now 69 years old with short white hair and a stocky build, he relies heavily on anonymous tipsters in running his blog and publishes stories that sometimes rely on a single source he knows only by email. Rickards said sources earn his trust over time as they provide useful information and he does not care about criticism that this method is not transparent or always reliable.

“Don’t hold me to the standards of writing a term paper, writing for The New York Times, writing for CBS, writing for The Chronicle,” Rickards said in a hotel lobby in New Jersey during the second of our interviews. “This is a blog. It does what it does. We are highly reliant on sources, and we will go places that others may fear to go.”

Rickards wore a blazer, khaki pants, a plaid shirt and black-rimmed bifocal glasses. It was the first time I had met him in person, though we had exchanged emails before. Last year, while I was The Chronicle’s news editor, he sent me more than one hundred emails containing detailed conspiracy theories, story ideas and criticism of The Chronicle. (He believes, for example, that The Chronicle’s writers are not critical enough of Duke’s decision makers.) For the sake of remaining objective, I maintained some distance by telling him I would consider his ideas as I would consider all story ideas but not respond to each email.

Johnston, Rickards’ former law professor, is one Loyal Reader. He remembers Rickards as a quiet, unassuming student who did not speak up much but was always prepared when he was called on. Now Johnston, Trinity ’54 and Law ’56, relies on his former student’s blog as more or less his sole source to learn about controversial aspects of Duke.

Johnston recalls that once, after Rickards learned about land records in a law school class, he and a classmate went to the courthouse to examine deeds of residences located in the Duke Forest called the Duke Homesites. What they found shocked them. Even as the University was desegregating, the deeds contained discriminatory policies that restricted access to the properties for blacks. Although courts in the state no longer had the power to enforce some of the clauses in the deeds, their existence reflected racist intents, Rickards wrote in a recent email.

This incident, said Johnston, was when he began to believe that Rickards was a talented investigative journalist.

“As I recall, the administration was very unhappy about it, but they sure as hell got rid of that racial covenant,” Johnston said.

As a student, Rickards didn’t stop there. When some on-campus eateries replaced butter with margarine, he made sure that the school followed laws intended to help consumers realize what they were eating was not butter. The margarine had to be served in triangular packaging—not squares.

This is Ed Rickards, always passionate and often antagonistic.

He takes pride in being the toughest tenant in his New York City apartment building. Because he is older than 62, by law he cannot be evicted by the building’s management. Knowing this, he sends letters demanding the building is maintained to the standards set in previous years. “I feel that more than other people I have the background and the capacity and the iron will,” he said.

Rickards considers himself an expert on customer rewards programs. Years ago, Hertz had a deal that awarded customers who rented enough cars a free one-week stay at a Holiday Inn. The company originally said the coupon could be used at any location worldwide but then sent Rickards a list of select hotels where he could redeem the offer. Many of the 39 locations were around Baltimore, which he had no interest in visiting. “Well we’re not going to let you get away with that,” Rickards said. “So I sued them and won.” The company paid damages of around $1,000.

He also takes credit for proposing the idea of smoke-free taxicabs in New York City. After dirtying his pants by mistakenly sitting in a pile of cigarette ashes, he wrote the taxi and limousine commission. He said they eventually approved the change on the grounds that it would avoid exposing drivers to second-hand smoke. Ironically, Rickards admitted, his complaint had nothing to do with smoking.

Needless to say, more than a few people have called Ed Rickards a piece of work. He doesn’t mind. “What people think, that’s not what guides me,” Rickards said.

Rickards believes that behind closed doors in the Allen Building, some administrators call him “The Mosquito.” He said he learned of the nickname from an anonymous source by email. This may seem a bit implausible, but it makes for a good story and Rickards seems entertained by the idea.

For better or for worse, Fact Checker relies on anonymous sources whose motives for coming forward cannot be ascertained.

Rickards’ policy of protecting those who feed him information ideally increases transparency by allowing Duke stakeholders to come forward with information that they could not reveal if their names were associated with the tips. “The Allen Building Mole,” for example, is the name Rickards uses for a source he believes is well-placed in Duke’s administration. Rickards does not even know whether the source is a man or a woman. In recent weeks, an anonymous source that goes by the name “The Lone Ranger” spent $20 to ship Rickards printed materials for use on the blog.

Of course, there are reasons why relying on anonymous sources can become problematic. The practice makes it impossible for Loyal Readers to consider for themselves whether the tipsters the blog cites are reliable sources for the specifics they provide. If contributors to Fact Checker have hidden agendas they hope to promote, their anonymity shields them from scrutiny.

For an organization that demands transparency from all corners of Duke’s campus, Fact Checker is not particularly a model of openness. The Deputy Fact Checkers remain anonymous, though they change over time. One of Rickards’ friends proofreads the posts after getting off a media job at midnight, but all Rickards will disclose about him is that his first name is Bob. In defending his practices, Rickards said he thinks Duke administrators have a responsibility for transparency that a blogger does not have.

Rickards is quick to post information on the site. Recently, he published a story reporting that Chief Medical Officer Dr. Michael Cuffe was leaving Duke to be president of the Hospital Corporation of America. Rickards had already speculated on the doctor’s new salary by the time he realized that Cuffe had accepted a job as a division president, not president of the entire company. “We put speed ahead of other values,” Rickards confessed in a correction notice.

To Rickards’ frustration, few of Duke’s top administrators respond to his requests for comment or more information about the goings-on of the University.

He writes lengthy emails detailing posts he is working on but rarely receives responses. Schoenfeld, Lange and Brodhead typically ignore his correspondence. Executive Vice President Tallman Trask used to respond with short answers but has since stopped, Rickards said. The exception to the rule is Dr. Victor Dzau, chancellor for health affairs and president and CEO of the Duke University Health System, who sometimes responds to him. Dzau happens to receive less flack on the blog.

In part, Rickards uses administrators’ failures to answer him as justification for his inaccuracies. He writes emails to officials informing them of what a source has told him and asks them to respond to the claims before a deadline he sets a few days later.

“If something is wrong, it is not my error,” Rickards wrote in an email about his own words. “I will note that we had no cooperation. The alternative is to let Peter [Lange] and Mike [Schoenfeld] squelch the story—and that is not going to happen.”

Schoenfeld was unwilling to discuss Fact Checker on the record but agreed to talk about the criteria the public relations office uses to determine which media outlets to respond to. In short, Duke chooses to ignore those it finds it impossible to cooperate with. This includes abusive publications that willfully and consistently distort information, engage in name-calling, threats and personal attacks or operate anonymously. “That’s just a basic axiom of public relations,” Schoenfeld said. “If someone over a period of time consistently misrepresents your institution and your position regardless of the information that you provide, then there is little value in trying to engage.”

Rickards said he believes that since Schoenfeld arrived at Duke he has counseled a number of sources not to answer Fact Checker requests. “My over-arching comment on Schoenfeld is [that] he will not provide me with information because he does not like my editorial position,” Rickards wrote in an email the day after we met in the hotel. “If I were singing Brodhead’s praises every day, he’d join me at the Sheraton too. And the way he has conducted himself in office is deleterious to Duke University.”

Schoenfeld looked surprised when I asked whether he reaches out to other members of the faculty to tell them not to respond to specific people. “Of course not,” Schoenfeld said, insisting that he only gives advice to those who ask for it and that faculty and students are encouraged to interact with the public freely.

The lack of contact nonetheless peeves Rickards. He said the University’s bylaws entitle him to provide his thoughts about the direction of the University and that Duke officials should be willing to provide information to help him develop his perspective. “The Alumni may consider and make recommendations to the President and to the Board of Trustees regarding any and all phases of education and alumni affairs of the University,” Article 16, Section 2 of the bylaws read.

Whether this section of the bylaws entitles alumni to frequent direct contact with top Duke officials is not clear. The section that immediately follows asks that alumni organize through the Duke University Alumni Association by means of elected representative to give input on alumni matters but makes no mention of how graduates should expect to influence educational affairs.

Rickards has no plan to slow down.

September marked the launch of Duke Check, a new location for Rickards’ blogging that he plans to expand. He hopes to add columnists to the site and he has even considered the idea of having local restaurant reviews—something he wrote himself during his time at law school. A new type of post that he calls “Meatloaf” consists of smaller stories that do not warrant their own separate posts. He is considering aesthetic changes to the site as well.

As for his own future, Rickards plans to keep writing. He said he occasionally jokes with contributors about the idea of grooming a successor for Fact Checker, but even in retirement he will continue to blog for as long as he is able to.

“That’s right, until I croak,” Rickards said. “Something they can look forward to.”