NYT's David Brooks:"The Duke Witch Hunt"

In the May 28 NY Times and republished in the May 31 Raleigh News & Observer David Brooks' column, The Duke Witch Hunt, begins:

Witch hunts go in stages. First frenzy, when everybody damns the souls of people they don't know. Then confusion, as the first wave of contradictory facts comes in. Then deafening silence, as everybody studiously ignores the vicious slanders they uttered during the moment of maximum hysteria.

But now that we know more about the Duke lacrosse team, simple decency requires that we return to that scandal, if only to correct the slurs that were uttered by millions of people, including me.

My first feeling after reading those words was relief: the outrageously unfair treatment the Duke Men’s lacrosse team’s received from the media and others seems to be beginning to subside.

I also thought how the players, their families and friends must have felt reading those words.

I admired Brooks for having the grace and character to write them. Many who've said and done things far more unfair and dangerous than anything Brooks said will probably never acknowledge what they did, much less do it publicly.

I also thought this: "I know the 'must pay for Times Select' doesn’t like bloggers sharing an entire column with readers, but there are occasions when an exception is in order."

This is one of them so the rest of Brooks’ column follows.

I’ll say much more about it tonight.

We know now that the Duke lacrosse players are not the dumb jocks they were portrayed to be. The team has a 100 percent graduation rate. Over the past five years 146 members of the team made the Atlantic Coast Conference Academic Honor Roll, twice as many as any other A.C.C. lacrosse team.

According to the faculty report written by the law professor James E. Coleman and others — which stands out as the one carefully researched and intellectually honest piece of work in this whole mess — "The lacrosse team's academic performance generally is one of the best among all Duke athletic teams."

We also know that the lacrosse players are not the amoral goons of popular legend. The members of the Coleman commission interviewed many of the people the players came into contact with and found almost universal praise and admiration.

The groundskeeper and the equipment manager described the current team as among the best groups of young men they have worked with during their long tenures at Duke.

"The committee has not heard evidence that the cohesiveness of this group is either racist or sexist," the Coleman report says. The current and former black members of the team are "extremely positive" about the support they received. The coach of the women's lacrosse team says relations between the men and women are respectful and supportive. "They are great kids," she has said of the male players.

The male lacrosse players "volunteered for numerous community service activities," the report says, including reading programs, mentoring programs, the Special Olympics and Katrina relief.

Curiously, Nexis searches suggest that these facts have scarcely been reported in any newspaper or magazine.

We also know, as the Coleman report makes clear, that the members of the lacrosse team drank heavily, and when they did, they behaved irresponsibly. Of the 14 cases of "alcohol-unsafe" behavior reported at Duke in the fall of 2005, three involved lacrosse players. Of the four reported cases of disorderly conduct, one involved a lacrosse player.

Team members were caught playing drinking games, publicly urinating and hitting golf balls at buildings. The report notes that their behavior was alarming and deplorable, but adds: "Their conduct has not been different in character than the conduct of the typical Duke student who abuses alcohol. Their reported conduct has not involved fighting, sexual assault or harassment, or racist behavior."

We also know that the events of the night of March 13 are anything but clear-cut. In The National Journal, Stuart Taylor has written a devastating couple of essays on the weak case of the prosecutor, Mike Nifong. Citing the lack of DNA evidence, the seemingly exculpatory digital photos and the testimony of a taxi driver, Taylor, who is one of the most admired legal journalists in the country, estimates that there is an 85 percent chance the players are innocent.

Now, with the distance of some time, a few things are clear. There may have been a rape that night, but it didn't grow out of a culture of depravity, and it can't be explained by the sweeping sociological theories that were tossed about with such wild abandon a few weeks ago.

Furthermore, when you look at the hyperpoliticized assertions made by Jesse Jackson, Houston Baker and dozens of activists and professors, you see how mighty social causes like the civil rights movement, feminism and the labor movement have spun off a series of narrow social prejudices among the privileged class.

The members of the lacrosse team were male, mostly white and mostly members of the suburban bourgeois middle class (39 of 54 recent graduates went on to careers in finance). For many on the tenured left, bashing people like that is all that's left of their once-great activism.

And maybe the saddest part of the whole reaction is not the rush to judgment at the start, but the unwillingness by so many to face the truth now that the more complicated reality has emerged.