It was almost ten years ago that the infamous Duke lacrosse case broke. The national media and many Duke faculty members rushed to judge the accused students guilty of rape. They were white men and the accuser was a black woman; they were “privileged” and she was from an “oppressed” class. The story just had to be true; it fit the leftist critique of America so perfectly.

One of the small number of scholars who questioned the story was Brooklyn College history professor Robert (K.C.) Johnson, who smelled something fishy in Durham and began to investigate and write about it in a blog he called “Durham in Wonderland” (closed in 2014, but still available here).

In today’s Pope Center article, he looks back at the case and says that Duke has learned nothing from it — even though the university had to spend millions to settle cases brought against it by the players.

Johnson reminds us of one of the ugliest facts about the case, namely the way a large number of Duke faculty members (the “Group of 88″) quickly published a statement condemning the players, merely assuming that the accusations must be true. Presumption of innocence? Not for white college athletes! Particularly revealing was the Group’s praise for campus protesters who demanded immediate punishment for the players: “Thank you for not waiting and for making yourselves heard,” they said. Johnson asks, “Why was it so important for the protesters not to have waited until the facts were known? Not a single member of the Group of 88 has ever explained.”

I think in that statement, we have something like the Big Bang of college intolerance so widespread today: professors telling students that it’s good to act raucously on preconceived ideas and waiting to discover the truth is somehow weak.

How has Duke treated those faculty members? Not one was ever rebuked. On the contrary, quite a few have been promoted.

Moreover, the university has decided that it needs to increase its “diversity” (that is, diversity with regard to race, ethnicity and gender, but not intellectual diversity) by hiring more bureaucrats to push “diversity” programs and hire more women and underrepresented minority faculty. Johnson observes that Duke officials have ignored the connection between the embarrassing lacrosse case and “the unintended consequences of its diversity obsession.”

Finally, Johnson reflects on the absurdity of the incessantly repeated claims that the nation is in the grip of a “campus rape epidemic” where schools are supposedly hostile to sexual assault accusers. “Tell that to anyone who experienced the Duke lacrosse case,” he writes, since the truth is that the scales of justice are today even more unbalanced against defendants than they were a decade ago.