From the "a plague on all their houses" department:

Duke University President Richard Brodhead today called on Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong to withdraw from the case of three Duke lacrosse players charged with rape in connection with an incident earlier this year.  Brodhead said Nifong's divisive public statements and decision to drop the charge bring into question the remaining charges of kidnapping and sexual offense.

Brodhead's response to the rapidly unravelling cases against the players mirrors the reaction of the public in general.  Unfortunately, all sides in the case want a situation where heroes form a line on one side and villians the other.  It seems obvious there is little evidence to substantiate the charges, and just as obvious that the lacrosse team was a male version of "girls gone wild".  It should not be forgotten that at least one player threw gasoline on the fire by using highly charged racial rhetoric in an e-mail just after the event.

In light of Brodhead's new found interest in due process, it would be a good idea to look back at the statement issued at the time by the executive committee of the academic council at his instigation.  The text will come first, in the original geek, and then a translation into English.

"The following statement is based on the Executive Committee of the Academic Council's best overall sense of that meeting, and it is ECAC's attempt to convey some of the intensity and cogency of faculty responses -- not only to events unfolding around the March 13/14th episode involving members of the lacrosse team, but also to the host of related concerns about the undergraduate experience at our school that this episode has made especially and painfully evident."

'we're mad as heck at these young punks.'

"We recognize clearly that the legal process relating to this incident and any individuals who may be named in it must and should take its own due course; charges of this grave nature belong in the jurisdiction of governmental and not university educational authorities. That said, and aside from any charges ultimately emerging from the prosecutorial investigation, it is the sense of the faculty that we have reached the point where a critical mass of information and witness concerning lacrosse team behavior compels a comprehensive inquiry into the program, its culture, its staff, and its effects on the daily lives of our students and our neighbors."

OK, we know there will have to be a trial, but we already know who these thugs are and what they are about.

"Across college campuses, already volatile issues of race, gender, and class privilege intersect negatively with the powerful social reaches of sports culture and alcohol use on campus. The events of the past weeks have occasioned collective reflection and collective anguish on the part of the Duke faculty. The anguish comes from faculty who already felt too familiar, by experience and by expertise, with the taxing terms and conditions of campus life for many segments of our student body."

Now, we aren't saying they actually own white robes and have burned crosses in people's yards, but they are wealthy white kids so you do the math.

"The problem now in front of us, individually and as a collective body of teachers, presents vast challenges. Not the least of these challenges concerns the formulation of a response that will be both substantive and consequential when relevant structural realities and cultural practices far exceed the reach of any one university. What we need now is to determine which aspects of our local manifestation of the mix of race, gender, sexuality, sport, and alcohol in undergraduate culture can be addressed effectively by the means available to us as an academic community -- not in an attempt to curtail social life on campus, but in order to promote justice, a more respectful social and educational environment, and real conviviality."

One wonders how many words it takes the Duke faculty to say 'supersize it' when going through a drive through window. In short, the committee is rubbing it's hands together gleefully contemplating how much group think they can collectively inflect on the student body in the name of reform.

"Regardless of developments in the narrower legal situation, or in a review of the lacrosse program, we as faculty need to develop richer forms of attentiveness to the lives and hopes of our students."

Our students are rudderless, drunken, ships careening from one set of rocks to another with only a vague sense of ethical conduct.   Who knew?

As you can see from the statement, Duke University itself was engaged in exactly the same sort of rush to judgement that Brodhead now condemns in Nifong.  Worse still, the faculty pushed it's way to the front of the mob in order to advance their own idealogically driven agendas.  You can't read the statement without a clear idea that the faculty believed the accuser and thought the players were guilty.  This before an investigation was even fully underway.

Now, I have little sympathy for the lacrosse players.  I question whether the money their parents have spent educating a number of these young men shouldn't have been set aside to pay for future attorneys fees for divorces, sexual harrasment suits, and drunk driving convictions.   But  the parents sent their children to be educated by a lumpen mass of intellectually vacant posers in exchange for being able to put a "Duke Parent" bumper sticker on their Lexus SUV's so perhaps they have gotten some measure of deserved comeuppence.

So, let's hope Nifong quickly grabs the skids of the last helicopter out of this mess and withdraws from the social Vietnam he created in Durham.  The accuser can exit stage left.  The clowns, jugglers, and drunken lacrosse players stage right.  May it be a cold, cold day in the long distant future before we see any member of this particular circus on our sports page again.