Experts: Duke can weather storm of lacrosse scandal
A pair of baseball players and their coach left Duke University last April in a steroid scandal. Two months later, the school?s world-renowned hospital revealed doctors operated on nearly 4,000 patients with instruments washed in used hydraulic fluid.
Now the campus is reeling from allegations that members of the nearly all-white men?s lacrosse team raped and racially insulted a black stripper. No charges have been filed.
Duke?s tough year has university administrators worried: Has this chain of ugly events damaged Duke?s hard-earned image as the South?s ?Ivy League? school? Will the latest scandal drive away students who strive to earn the academic credentials needed to win a coveted place in the classrooms of Duke?s Gothic-styled campus?
?Did I make the wrong decision by accepting to go to this University’? a black 17-year-old asked in a posting made in a Duke forum on MySpace.com.
Duke officials picked up the pace of their reaction to the burgeoning scandal this past week. On Wednesday, it took the school just hours to cancel the lacrosse season and accept the resignation of the team?s coach after the release of an e-mail sent by a team member that President Richard H. Brodhead called ?sickening and repulsive.? That night, Brodhead initiated a series of internal investigations into Duke?s response to the allegations and into whether the school has fostered a culture of intolerance and elitism.
Painful as this current self-examination may become, experts said Duke will weather the storm.
?Duke has already done more … than any other institution facing a crisis in the 21st century,? said Sheldon Steinbach, general counsel of the American Council on Education, which represents 1,800 colleges and universities.
?They have been forthcoming, open, honest ? to the extreme that?s legally permissible ? and have not stonewalled or hunkered down,? Steinbach said.
The alleged rape March 14 at an off-campus house has turned up the heat on long-simmering tensions between Duke and some Durham residents, and among students of different races. The city?s population is equally divided between blacks and whites, but only 11 percent of Duke?s 6,200 undergraduates are black ? although that figure has about doubled in the past two decades.
?One of the things that?s been, of course, really hurtful about this story is it?s led people who?ve never been to Duke or Durham to think they know all about it because they?ve seen 30 seconds on TV or read a three-paragraph news story,? Brodhead said.