INC NEWS - Column: Duke tries to shift the blame (Herald-Sun)

[John Schelp]

Column: Duke tries to shift the blame
by John Schelp, guest columnist
Herald-Sun, 16 May 2006

Durham City Manager Patrick Baker is a profile in
courage. And Duke administrators should be ashamed of
themselves for trying to shift public attention away
from their incompetence by blaming the Durham police
for Duke's mishandling of the lacrosse case.

It's irresponsible for Duke officials to suggest that
the Durham Police Department was not taking the sexual
assault allegations very seriously. The well-known
facts say otherwise. Durham police immediately
launched a full investigation into the allegations. 

For Duke officials to claim it took them weeks realize
how serious the situation was, when the investigation
was being reported in both the local and national
press means they're either clueless -- or having
difficulty with truthfulness.

This is not the first time Duke officials have tried
to shift the blame when they get in trouble. Sadly,
Duke often tries to shift the blame to the city:

After some of the infamous out-of-control parties a
few years ago, newspaper and listserv accounts
described Duke students vomiting and urinating in
yards, yelling curses at neighbors, kicking down
neighbors' doors and throwing beer bottles at pregnant
women. In response, Duke's PR official John Burness
blamed the Durham police for not being aggressive
enough in their policing of the students' behavior and
added that the police had apologized for this. Burness
said nothing about the behavior of the students or of
any responses Duke would be taking to curb the
behavior.

After Duke's efforts to secretly buy Erwin Field were
exposed, Burness was quoted in the newspaper blaming
the city for not talking with surrounding
neighborhoods about Duke's campus land-use plans. 

Ironically, at the time, Duke officials (including
Burness) were engaged in discussions with surrounding
neighborhoods about their campus land-use plans. But
at no point during these discussions did Duke
officials mention its plans for the soccer field next
to Central Campus.

After a Duke official got caught trying to change the
university-college ordinance to allow unlimited retail
on Central Campus, Burness told a reporter that what
upset the neighbors was an e-mail from the City-County
Planning Department. 

What in fact upset the neighbors was a university
official going behind our backs to change a critical
element of the ordinance that we were led to believe
was already settled.

The Bowen-Chambers report does reach a very important
conclusion: "it is a mistake to have responsibility
for Duke outreach efforts into the community overseen
by the Vice President for Public Affairs. The effect,
as one person put it, is to think of everthing Duke
does as motivated by PR concerns rather than by a
genuine interest in the welfare of the community." The
sooner President Brodhead moves the Neighborhood
Partnership Initiative out of Duke's PR office the
better.

To Baker: Keep up the good work. Ask Duke why
administrators sat on their report for four days
before its release? Why didn't they give you a
heads-up on what it said about the investigation? 

Are they sitting on any other reports we should know
about?

To senior Duke officials: How dare you talk publicly
about healing between town and gown -- while trying to
shift the blame for your incompetence to the City of
Durham?