Dartblog

The ladies and gentlemen of the Duke Conservative Union, who were—for no good reason, really—the principal defenders of patient justice when three lacrosse players were accused of rape, have placed a full page advertisement in today’s issue of The Duke Chronicle, the daily student newspaper. The advertisement is a response to the original ‘Group of 88’ advertisement which, along with other narrow minded and prejudicial pap, was plastered all ‘round Durham in an effort to condemn the lacrosse players using the popular academic cant of “social justice,” “privilege,” “community,” and so on. All of this occurred before the trial even started. The 88 radical professors were engaging in something they claimed to detest: prejudice.

Convinced that they had finally found a real-world situation to match the race- and class-obsessed sturm und drang of their syllabi, Duke professors set out to ensure that the public would view the situation through their gray-colored goggles. In the event, the case against the players just vaporized and with it all the tired talk about “social disasters.”

Now the Duke Conservatives, who brooked horrible castigation and, without uttering a nasty word and without raising a voice in anger, continued doggedly to press for fair treatment of the accused players in the most poisonous climate imaginable, have written an elegant request that the eighty-seven professors—one has since defected—apologize for their childish behavior. A member writes:

Why did the DCU decide to run such an advertisement? We are not under the illusion that any, much less all, of these faculty members will admit to any wrongdoing on their part. However, this is a clear message to the Duke faculty that some students will not tolerate their brand of pernicious radicalism any longer. Over four years at a place that I love dearly, I have seen example after example of professors using their position to further their Leftist agendas. Unfortunately, few students publicly and authoritatively held them accountable for their efforts. With the petition signed by over a thousand students (found here) and today’s advertisement, the tide is changing on Duke’s campus.

It is hardly necessary to append that opposition to professorial radicalism need not be partisan in nature. There is nothing distinctly liberal about accusing an entire class of students of being racist would-be rapists. In fact, to do that is entirely reactionary, and indicative of the use of unthinking heuristic ideology that academics purport to detest. But because students with well meaing liberal sympathies so often allow progressivism to be radically redefined by their professors, it tends to fall to campus conservatives to parry outrages like that perpetrated by the Group of 88.

Good on the Duke Conservative Union.