After Duke’s women’s basketball team beat UNC at home on Wednesday, students gathered on the main west quad to celebrate the victory by burning some benches. Here’s a photo slideshow from photographers Courtney Douglas and Michael Naclerio.
To see a photo slideshow from the game, click here.
On
November 10 was the day the economic turmoil of the past year and a half hit home for many Duke undergraduates.
That Tuesday, students found out that the University was planning to lay off the director of the Multicultural Center and another well-liked staff member.
Nearly 300 employees—mostly secretaries, housekeepers and other lower-paid workers—had already accepted retirement packages, and another 200 were being offered incentives to leave. Departments—from academics to athletics—were cutting spending. The threat of further layoffs was in the air (and remains in the air: 57 percent of the University’s spending [link opens PDF] goes to salaries and benefits, after all), and the University was searching for still more ways to cut its budget, working to close a $125 million hole left by a falling endowment and empty-pocketed donors.
The decade wasn’t supposed to end this way, with impassioned students protesting and petitioning the administration to retain beloved members of the Duke community and cancel a planned merger of the Multicultural Center and International House (The protests failed on the first goal and succeeded on the second).
Until the last years, it had been a decade of growth on every front for Duke.
Surging endowments and overwhelming giving helped build buildings, hire professors and bring in more students than ever before. Deep pockets funded top-10 sports teams and lured a football coach who knows how to win.
Money also led to big dreams: A New Campus was planned to replace the garden apartments of Central Campus and redefine residential life at Duke. Designs were drawn for a glass pavilion to replace the West Union building.
Today, construction plans have been put on hold, professor hiring is down and athletic spending stands to be scrutinized.
Blue Devils, from the top of the administration to job-hunting alumni and undergraduates, have been forced to dream smaller.
The effects of the recession is number 1 on our stories of the decade list. These are the issues and events that made headlines for weeks at a time over the last ten years, those that sparked the most debate on campus and beyond, and the ones that we believe will continue to shape our coverage in the years to come.
Photo Licensed via Creative Commons from Corey Butler
David Evans, Colin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann at a press conference in April 2007 (from left to right)
It started, as we all know by now, with a Spring Break party hosted by the lacrosse players at 610 N. Buchanan Blvd March 13, 2006. It burgeoned into one of the most difficult crises the University has ever had to confront in its history as well as one of the most prominent examples of prosecutorial misconduct in the nation.
Crystal Gail Mangum, one of two exotic dancers hired to perform at the lacrosse party, falsely accused three members of the 2005-2006 men’s lacrosse team of rape. Even as the team’s captains “unequivocally” denied the allegations, their season was cancelled, head coach Mike Pressler was forced to resign and the case garnered national media attention as the Gothic Wonderland was swarmed with reporters and cameras looking for a story that seemingly spoke volumes about the intersection of race, sex and privilege (or not). Protestors too made their presence in Durham felt, culminating in the New Black Panthers for Self-Defense staging a demonstration just off campus in May.
Adding fuel to the fire, a group of 88 Duke professors printed an ad in The Chronicle in the midst of the allegations, asking, “What does a social disaster sound like?”–an act that drew ire from many in the following months.
Meanwhile, state investigators found that no lacrosse team members’ DNA matched biological evidence taken from Mangum and time-stamped photographs of the players further drew her varying accounts of the night into question. Nevertheless, then-Durham district attorney Mike Nifong told the media he was “convinced that there was a rape” and proceeded with his investigation. Sophomores Collin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann were charged with first degree forcible rape, first degree sexual offense and first degree kidnapping April 18. A month later, the day after his graduation, David Evans was also indicted. He told reporters that the accusations were “fantastic lies.”
Despite the continued lack of evidence and dubiousness of Mangum’s claims, however, Nifong pushed on with the charges, winning his bid for re-election to the DA’s office in November 2006 against Lewis Cheek and write-in candidate Steve Monks. It was not until Mangum said she could no longer confidently testify that she was penetrated in that Nifong dropped the rape charges against Seligmann, Finnerty and Evans in late December. At the same time, the North Carolina State Bar launched an inquiry into possible ethics violations on Nifong’s part. The DA recused himself from the case days later, handing the investigation over to North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper.
On April 11, 2007, after a four-month review of the case, Cooper dropped the remaining charges of sexual assault and kidnapping at a nationally televised press conference and took the unusual step of proclaiming the three indicted players “innocent” as well as condemning Nifong’s conduct.
The episode, however, was not entirely over. Duke announced a settlement with Finnerty, Evans and Seligmann and
Disgraced former district attorney Mike Nifong reports to jail in September 2007.
their families for an undisclosed amount of money in June. Days later, Nifong resigned from the office of Durham district attorney as the State Bar concluded their investigation into his behavior and moved to disbar him. In late August, the already disgraced ex-prosecutor was convicted of criminal contempt for knowingly making false statements during the case and ordered to spend a single day in jail. In September, President Richard Brodhead, speaking at a Law School conference apologized to the 2005-2006 lacrosse players and their families for the University’s lack of support “in this time of extraordinary peril.”
Since then, the lacrosse scandal has spawned a campus culture report, numerous lawsuits (Kyle Dowd v. the University; former head coach Mike Pressler v. the University–despite an earlier settlement; the three indicted players v. the City of Durham; the 38 unindicted players v. the University and the city of Durham), several books (Until Proven Innocent, The Last Dance from Grace: The Crystal Mangum Story–reviewed here, It’s Not About the Truth), even talks of a HBO movie. And several lessons learned about the imperfect nature of the justice system.
The lacrosse case is Number 2 on our stories of the decade list. These are the issues and events that made headlines for weeks at a time over the last ten years, those that sparked the most debate on campus and beyond, and the ones that we believe will continue to shape our coverage in the years to come.
If you haven’t noticed as we draw to the close of this decade, the media loves its lists. There’s Time’s annual world’s most influential people list, Rolling Stones’ Best Albums of the Decade, the New York Times Book Review’s Best of 2009, the New Yorker’s Best Films of the Decade…and the list goes on and on and on, if you’ll pardon the pun.
The Chronicle too has caught listmania with Recess staff members compiling their own Top Ten Tracks of 2009 and Sports doing a series on Duke’s All-Decade Teams. We at News have been perhaps a little slower on the uptake, but we too wanted to bring you a list–of the top ten news stories of the decade.
These are the issues and events that made headlines for weeks at a time over the last ten years, those that sparked the most debate on campus and beyond, and the ones that we believe will continue to shape our coverage in the years to come.
As we publish our picks, we’ll be posting an updated list here:
10. North Carolina swings blue in 2008
9. Building, building, building
8. The murders of Abhijit Mahato and Eve Carson
7. Problems for the Duke University Health System
6. September 11th and the wars on terror
5. New rules for living and learning
Disagree with our choices? Think our news sense is bogus? Let us know what you think. We’d love to hear from you.
