Accountability of Duke College Professors

Judge Joseph W. Bellacosa, a former member of the New York Court of Appeals and a former Dean at St. John's University School of Law wrote an interesting editorial dated August 3, 2007 in New York Newsday entitled "Duke faculty should be shunned by students" concerning a letter that 88 Duke University Professors signed which condemned the Duke University lacrosse players who were accused of rape.

Judge Bellacosa's point, and it is a good one, is that the professors were not accountable for their rush to judgment. As Judge Bellacosa states:

The 88 are thus granted a kind of institutional immunity, a corruption of process all by itself because it sidesteps a day of public reckoning. But although the group can't technically be charged with crimes - though abandoning your young and endangering youth sure do come close to real definable crimes - there are ways these professors can be held accountable. The identities of the 88 professors should be posted in significant ways and places, including in the media and on the Internet, so that they may be known for what they have done.

The likely howls of protest from the tenure police, university guild apologists and free-speech absolutists notwithstanding, the professoriat should not be shielded from appropriate public condemnation for their misconduct. Their dormant consciences and sensibilities should be reawakened to the abhorrent nature of the actions they inflicted on their own students.

Judge Bellacosa hopes that these professors will be assigned elective classes and that Duke students boycott them.

This article, as well as the whole Duke case, demonstrates the importance of the presumption of innocence.

Mitchell H. Rubinstein