Duke’s meta-narrative

Charlotte Allen in the Weekly Standard explains how the “tenured vigilantes” of Duke’s notoriously “postmodern” liberal arts faculty helped enable Mike Nifong’s scandalous prosecution of three Duke lacrosse players. Duke’s meta-narrators aren’t the only ones who embarrassed themselves through their commentary about the case. Allen points to Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick, Washington Post light-weight columnist Eugene Robinson, and (no surprise here) Susan Estrich, among others.
But it was the gibberish-spouting Duke faculty members who helped provide Nifong the cover he may have needed to conduct his wrongful prosecution. As Duke chemistry professor Stephen Baldwin explains, “Nifong could say, ‘Here’s a significant portion of the arts and sciences faculty who feel this way, so I can go after these kids because these faculty agree with me.'” Thus, the prosecutor and the faculty postmodernists “fed off each other.”
If you’d like to help defray the legal fees that Nifong and his co-conspirators inflicted on the lacrosse players, go here.