Content area
Full text
Acad. Quest. (2008) 21:114121 DOI 10.1007/s12129-008-9040-3
REVIEWS
Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case, by Stuart Taylor, Jr., and KC Johnson. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2007, 432 pp., $26.95 hardbound.
Durhams Disgrace
Michael I. Krauss
Published online: 26 April 2008# Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2008
on, and the course syllabus clearly specified the penalty). Nonetheless, she warned that if I didnt increase her final grade she would accuse me of racial discrimination. She casually informed me that both at prep school in Shaker Heights, Ohio and at college at Northwestern, she had experienced similar problems. In every case, she said, professors had seen the light and increased her grade.
The students ensuing discrimination charge, and the hearings they provoked, earned me attention from most major newspapers and consumed two years of my career. During this time colleagues and law school administrators alike beseeched me to pay the tax, increase the students grade, and apologize for my nonexistent discrimination. By the time the law school, the university, and the federal Department of Education had dismissed my accusers complaints, I had become a different person. But I was not suspended, imprisoned, or impoverished, and I was only threatened with bodily harm once.1 Several
In 1994, when I was a relatively young law professor, I learned the hard way that American higher education had largely abandoned the freedoms to teach (Lehrfreiheit) and to learn (Lernfreiheit) that had made our universities the envy of the West. I had given a student a very poor final grade in 1L Torts: the grade was a (blind-graded) mediocre final exam score, adjusted down one notch for poor class participation. The student, an African-American woman, conceded to me that she deserved the poor class performance penalty (she had been unprepared for class when called
1My family did receive one anonymous threatening phone call, but the coincidental advent of caller ID saved the daywhen the caller phoned a second time to threaten my very young son with violence, and he read back the callers name (he was a member of the George Mason Black Law Students Association), the calls stopped forever.
Michael I. Krauss is professor of law at George Mason University...