REVEALED PREFERENCES. The allegations of rape by members of the Duke lacrosse team are without merit. Professor K. C. Johnson's Durham-in-Wonderland has done yeoman work addressing the failures both of the prosecutor and of the university administration, and the follies of assorted vanguardists on the faculty. But I have to wonder if the case tells us more about the administration and the vanguardists than simply their capacity to be outraged. Start with an observation by LaShawn Barber.

I’ve had the misfortune of knowing the type of privileged, ungrateful professors who inexplicably paint themselves as “victims” of “white male privilege.” They sounded stupid to me even when I was younger and liberal. I’d agree with what William Anderson, an assistant professor of economics at Frostburg State University, said about the Group of 88: “These young men represented everything these faculty members despised, and they were not going to permit something as bourgeois as truth stand in the way of their attempt to remake Duke University in their own image.”

The rot, dear readers, starts at the top. Consider the "Letter to the Duke Community" President Richard H. Brodhead issued on April 5, 2006.

Compounding and intensifying these issues of race and gender, they include concerns about the deep structures of inequality in our society—inequalities of wealth, privilege, and opportunity (including educational opportunity), and the attitudes of superiority those inequalities breed. And they include concerns that, whether they intend to or not, universities like Duke participate in this inequality and supply a home for a culture of privilege. The objection of our East Campus neighbors was a reaction to an attitude of arrogant inconsiderateness that reached its peak in the alleged event but that had long preceded it. I know that to many in our community, this student behavior has seemed to be the face of Duke.

There is more of the same in his January 8, 2007 "Letter to the Duke Community."

One thing that has made this event so difficult is that particular charges against individuals have tended to be conflated with larger community issues of race, gender, privilege, and respect. During these hard months, some have seemed to imply that if you insist on the students' innocence, then you must not care about the underlying issues. Others have seemed to suggest that if you insist on the underlying issues, then you must not care about fair treatment for the students.

But it is essential that we separate the legal case from the larger cultural issues and give each its separate, appropriate response. The Campus Culture Initiative, begun last year and due to report this spring, is not a referendum on the party last March. It is an effort to visualize the best community we could make for students to grow and learn in, a community of mutual respect and vibrant mutual engagement. It will be all of our work to advance toward that goal. I see this as a chance to build on existing strengths in our educational experience and to press toward higher ambitions: the latest chapter in Duke's long history of self-improvement.

That's about what Betsy Newmark anticipated in her Raleigh News-Observer column.

I expect we’ll hear instead calls for healing. The players will be urged to get on with their lives and not to focus on suing Durham or the D.A. They’ll be reminded that Durham is not a wealthy county and can’t afford an expensive civil suit.

Those who were quick to say that this story was emblematic of racism at elite colleges will say that the lesson is still true, even though this one specific story was a hoax. Wahneema Lubiano, the Duke professor of African and American Studies who led the group of 88 who published that ad, wrote back in May that, no matter the outcome, the whole story exposed deeper truths about racism on Duke’s campus. Expect that storyline to be repeated if the charges are all dropped. The song of “fake but accurate” will be sung again.

In another News-Observer column, Duke English professor Cathy Davidson reconsiders her position, while continuing to maintain that it's more important to denounce what happened rather than find out what happened first.

Last April I added my name to an ad published in the Duke Chronicle. The ad said that we faculty were listening to the anguish of students who felt demeaned by racist and sexist remarks swirling around in the media and on the campus quad in the aftermath of what happened on March 13 in the lacrosse house.

The insults, at that time, were rampant. It was as if defending David Evans, Collin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann necessitated reverting to pernicious stereotypes about African-Americans, especially poor black women. Many black students at Duke disappeared into humiliation and rage as the lacrosse players were being elevated to the status of martyrs, innocent victims of reverse racism.

As it turned out, 87 other faculty members were alarmed at this distressing side-effect of the lacrosse incident and signed the ad. I am positive I am not the only professor who was and continues to be adamant about the necessity for fair and impartial legal proceedings for David, Collin and Reade while also being dismayed by the glaring social disparities implicit in what we know happened on March 13.

A team of distinguished athletes at an elite and highly respected university hired two local women to strip at a house filled with men (including those underage) who had been drinking too much. That's sleazy, to say the least. That those women were women of color underscores the appalling power dynamics of the situation.

As a professor at Duke, I felt shame when the media's account of the behavior in the lacrosse house came to stand for all Duke students and the institution itself. So many students, faculty and administrators here work hard to live down our unflattering old segregation nickname, "the Plantation." Yet after March 13, Duke again came to symbolize (seemingly for the entire world) the most lurid and sexualized form of race privilege.

What, did all these academic hotshots wake up one morning and discover, "hey, we're working in a gilded ghetto, the academic equivalent of a gated community?" Professor Davidson continues,

We are in the midst of a social disaster where 18 percent of the American population lives below the poverty line and a disproportionate number of those are African-American. We live in the midst of a social disaster where 30 percent of our students do not graduate from high school (making the U.S. No. 17 in the world). We live in the midst of a social disaster where women's salaries for similar jobs are substantially less than men's (and, as of this year, starting to go down again, not up). We live in the midst of a social disaster where we do not have national health care or affordable childcare. And we live in a situation where a group of white athletes at a prominent university can get drunk and call out for a stripper the way they would a pizza.

As if a few college athletes hiring out a stripper is bidding up the price of childcare (hint: Say Aggregation Principle and power couples, many with professional degrees) or, more troublingly, as if an English professor has taken the time to understand "broken down by occupation, experience, and industry."

As if President Brodhead and Professor Davidson and the rest of the priviligentsia who signed that faculty letter have done anything concrete to address the "social disaster" she identifies. These people are working at Duke. The president used to be a high-level administrator at Yale. Have any of these people ever hired out at Temple or Wayne State or DePaul or Anonymous Community or any of the other institutions of higher learning where faculty struggle to establish their professional reputations while dealing with the perception that their work can't be as good as the stuff being done at Yale or at Duke and while attempting to work with precisely the students who those presidential letters and that op-ed suggests are being disrespected by the Dukies? (Sorry about the run-on sentence.) The disrespect begins with the administration and with the faculty, revealing a preference to mau-mau some of their students and condemn real or imagined social inequities, while leaving the real work of improving the lot of less-privileged students to invisible others. Mere de crisse, calisse d'tabarnac.