| Blog and Media Roundup - Monday, August 5, 2013; News Roundup | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Aug 5 2013, 04:19 AM (191 Views) | |
| abb | Aug 5 2013, 04:19 AM Post #1 |
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http://dukecheck.com/?p=15127 ✓ Highly critical of lacrosse team culture Posted on August 4, 2013 by DukeCheck Julius Chambers, who was initially barred because of his race from attending UNC Law School and who, once admitted, wound up ranked #1 in his class and editor-in-chief of the Law Review; who was a Charlotte civil rights lawyer who played a leading role in moving North Carolina beyond its segregated past; who was tapped to switch gears and become Chancellor of North Carolina Central University; and who as a resident of Durham during his retirement was called upon by President Brodhead to evaluate the response of his administration to the lacrosse crisis, died on Friday. He was 76 years old. Chambers and the retired president of Princeton University, William Bowen, produced a controversial if not inflammatory report that was off point: it did not focus on what Allen Building had done at all, but stretched to take a highly critical view of the lacrosse team. Many thought the Bowen-Chambers report, as it came to be known, went out of its way to slam the team: ”Increasingly, the lacrosse team was seen by at least some part of the Duke/Durham community as a manifestation of a white, elitist, arrogant sub-culture that was both indulged and self-indulgent.” Stuart Taylor, who with historian K C Johnson wrote the leading book on the false charges of rape that sparked the lacrosse crisis, Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustice of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case, denounced Bowen-Chambers, saying they appeared determined to “slime the lacrosse players in a report . . . that is a parody of race-obsessed political correctness.” Many felt that Bowen-Chambers wanted to dilute an earlier report that Brodhead had also commissioned, by Duke Law Professor James Coleman, who is black, which focused on behavior of the lacrosse team. Though Coleman rebuked the team’s dependence upon alcohol in social settings, he also praised the team members’ academic achievements, community service, and on-campus behavior. In time, Brodhead himself recognized how deficient his personal and his administration’s response to the crisis indeed was, and apologized to the three indicted students and their families for not being more supportive. Ironically, while Bowen-Chambers seemed to try to shield Brodhead for criticism, it set the stage for a continued rocky Presidency because it did not arrest concerns that many stakeholders had about Duke’s president. Chambers was born in rural North Carolina east of Charlotte, where his father was an auto mechanic who had a dream: that his son would go to integrated schools. That did not occur, not even in college. Chambers rose to prominence in the legal profession, and was the third person to lead the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which had been founded by Thurgood Marshall, who became a Supreme Court justice. His life was threatened repeatedly; his car firebombed twice in 1965. His home and his law office were damaged in the late 1960′s and early 1970′s. Chambers spearheaded many initiatives at NC Central, and conducted a $50 million fund-raising campaign which, at the time, was unheard of by a historically black college. He stepped down from the Chancellor’s position in 1990 because of prostate cancer. NC Central’s Julius L. Chambers Biomedical/Biotechnology Research Institute, which opened March of 1999 and serves as a hub for collaborate research with Research Triangle Park firms, is a tribute to him. In a 1997 campus speech, Chambers took a wide view of civil rights: “Many years ago, we defined it as the rights of African Americans to get equal opportunities in life. Now we have to broaden that focus and talk about the rights of all people, regardless of race, creed, economic condition or sexual preference.” Chambers’s wife died a year ago. He is survived by two children and three grandchildren. |
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| Payback | Aug 5 2013, 09:00 AM Post #2 |
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Your legacy is determined by the least honorable thing you do. |
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| Quasimodo | Aug 5 2013, 09:22 AM Post #3 |
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Great statement!  |
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| abb | Aug 5 2013, 08:17 PM Post #4 |
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http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2013/08/litigation-issues.html Monday, August 05, 2013 Litigation Issues As a reader of TheShadow University shortly after it was published, I understood well the due process difficulties in campus judicial systems. But until the lacrosse case, I simply assumed that because sexual assault is a crime, such matters were handled by police, not by a campus judiciary. In any event, how campuses handled sexual assault complaints couldn’t be more troubling than the manner in which they handled other allegations. That, obviously, isn’t the case. One of the most troubling counterfactuals of the lacrosse case is to wonder what might have occurred if Crystal Mangum had simultaneously filed a complaint through the Duke campus judicial process. If—and it’s not entirely clear—she had standing to have done so, there’s little doubt that a finding of guilty would have occurred. Procedurally, the accused students would have lacked the right to attorneys, been unable to access the critical DNA evidence, and would have faced severe evidentiary and time restrictions in presenting their case. Ideologically, the accused students would have been operating in an environment heavily influenced by the Group of 88 and their race/class/gender agenda. For a less explosive example, consider the case of Caleb Warner, a former University of North Dakota student whose school found him guilty of sexual assault—even as the local police filed charges against his accuser for filing a false police report. (As an aside, note that the police saying the accuser was lying wasn’t enough for the AP to identify the accuser, since “AP’s policy is not to identify alleged sexual assault victims,” even those the police have formally concluded made a false allegation.) The basic unfairness of campus sexual assault procedures was intensified by the 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter, about which I’ve written extensively at Minding the Campus, which dramatically lowered the burden of proof in campus sexual assault cases. In the last two months, however, two students convicted under their school’s wildly biased procedures filed suits in federal court. One lawsuit targeted Vassar College, which handles sexual assault claims through an “Interpersonal Violence Panel” whose procedures the college refuses to make publicly available. The second suit targeted St. Joseph’s University, after a process that appeared to ignore exculpatory text messages sent from the accuser to the student she accused. You can read my Vassar post here, and my St. Joe’s post here. In the aftermath of the “Dear Colleague” letter, and with administrators responsive to their school’s version of the Group of 88, it’s all but inconceivable to imagine many, or any, residential colleges restoring due process on their own. In the end, only intervention by federal courts—as occurred a generation ago with speech codes—will bring a measure of due process to how campuses handle allegations of sexual assaults. ------------------- Former NCCU chancellor Julius Chambers recently passed away. The most comprehensive obituary came in the Charlotte Observer, which recounted his myriad contributions to the causes of civil rights and due process over the course of his career. Obituaries, obviously, tend to stress the positive in a career, and it’s hard to find any positive in Chambers’ conduct in the lacrosse case, where he teamed with William Bowen to pen a whitewash report that supposedly represented a critical analysis of how the administration responded to the case. Yet the report didn’t even address the issues that ultimately would cost Duke millions of dollars in legal fees and settlements, largely because Bowen and Chambers operated under an ill-concealed assumptions that the rape allegations were likely true. The Observer didn’t reference Chambers’ conduct in the lacrosse case, which contradicted his career-long support for civil rights and due process. ----------- The Supreme Court has requested a formal response from Durham to the longshot appeal in the McFadyen case. While this move means the appeal hasn’t been rejected out of hand, the question doesn’t seem to be the type that’s likely to generate interest from the Court. Posted by KC Johnson at 8:35 PM |
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