The Duke lacrosse players have been declared innocent, and of course this is welcome, if dreadfully belated news. But we shouldn’t forget the origin of the injustice done to them in ideas promoted by the contemporary academy. In fact, it is bitterly fitting that this scandal took place at Duke, former home of Stanley Fish and his postmodern English department, proponents of the recent fads in academic theories that deny the possibility of truth and objectivity and replace them with the notion of multiplicities of narratives arising from different social circumstances. The theory entails ending the “privileging” of the narratives of the ”privileged,” mainly white men, and listening to the narratives of the “disenfranchised” and the “other.” This is exactly what Nifong did, in spite of the facts and the evidence. In addition, the notion that white men are the oppressors of all humanity, especially of minorities and women, closed the eyes of many in the Duke community to the facts and caused them to behave shamefully toward the accused, in a mirror image of what they deplored in racially charged incidents in the past–forgetting the presumption of innocence, declaring guilt based on ignorant prejudices, vilifying and persecuting the accused in signs and protests, comparing them to Hitler and the like. (The proverbial peasants with pitchforks look good in comparison. They really had something to be afraid of.) The whole thing is an example of ideas having consequences–that the theories and narratives and metanarratives conjured up in the protected environs of the ivory towers all through these years combined with the dark side of human nature have caused devastation in real life and in real time.