Mark Bauerlein has this excellent commentary over at NRO’s Phi Beta Cons on the open letter from Duke faculty that I posted here on Inkwell (and at PBC) yesterday:


“The letter from the Duke faculty posted by Allison has the tone of a measured and judicious response to the lacrosse case, but several times the tendentious heat seeps through. Consider this sentence: ‘We appreciate the efforts of those who used the attention the incident generated to raise issues of discrimination and violence.’ Now, just think of what it means to ‘use’ a controversial incident in which people’s lives are at stake in order to ‘raise issues of discrimination and violence.’ The slide into irresponsibility, the temptation to attach age-old grievances to every present circumstance, the assumption that the ‘users’ have a privileged hold on ‘discrimination and violence’ — all of these are precisely what due process is designed to forestall. The faculty praise people who exploited a tense situation. Don’t they see that this is one reason they took so much criticism?”