Crystal Magnum Opus: Duke University's Original Sin of Lacrosse
Florida Man vs. Crystal Mangum and White Man's Burden at Duke
Innocent at the beginning! Innocent now! Innocent forever!
Is that what George Wallace said in 1963? Oh, no. He was talking about something else. I must have forgotten.
Rather, that is what Kim Cates said about the Duke Lacrosse players in 2006. Cates owns Shooters II nightclub about which I already wrote in my November 29 article “No Time to Party: An Ode to Durham's Shooters II Saloon”.
While the Duke administration was ostracizing the young men falsely accused in the rape case, Kim Cates of Shooters II proudly rebelled against the institutional consensus and embraced the boys with open arms. This is where we got the framed sign shown above. Cates acquired this sign and got the signatures of all the boys on the maligned lacrosse team from 2006. She recently made an Instagram post with the sign in the wake of the recent news that Crystal Mangum — the accuser — admitted that she lied about the rape.
The news of Mangum two weeks ago disinterred much old discourse about the 2006 Duke Lacrosse case. As a Duke student, the case haunted us like a specter. We all knew that the three indicted lacrosse players — David Evans, Collin Finnerty, and Reade Seligmann — were innocent. That was the truth, but what was the capital T TRUTH. They were rich white lacrosse players, and the accuser was a black woman from the “other side” of Durham. It hits on capital T TRUTHS about socioeconomic cleavages in the United States. Okay. Maybe David, Collin, and Reade didn’t do it, but other white men did do it in the past in other cases. These three falsely accused boys could serve as avatars to bear the brunt of the castigation that so many white male rapists had evaded for centuries. Someone has to pay! Why not them? We cannot just rely on the so-called justice in the court system of the State of North Carolina. We need cosmic justice.
Even though Durham County DA Mike Nifong essentially framed the boys — for many months — the powers at Duke did not think that. The leftist students did not think that. Sure, innocence can reveal itself later on, but those few months were crucial and fundamentally transformed the psyche of Duke, its administration, its professors, its students, and prospective applicants. Even if it wasn’t a sin, the 2006 Duke Lacrosse case was Duke’s original sin.
Innocent Then, Innocent Now, Innocent Forever
When I was attending Duke as a student, I had gone to Shooters many times, yet I never consciously noticed the poster with all of the signatures of the 2006 Duke Lacrosse team members. Shooters II Saloon has too much visual stimulation already: the mechanical bull, people dancing in cages, that girl from your COMPSCI 201 class you have a crush on …
Okay. I got distracted, but I want to clarify that I am not speaking from personal experience. This is an abstracted idea of a girl in a computer science class to which many freshman boys at Duke can relate!
Despite my distraction by Jessica … I mean the abstracted COMPSCI girl … that signed poster has towered over Duke students for almost two decades. Duke just accepted its first batch of the Class of 2029 through the early decision process, and this class will be the first graduating class born after the lacrosse team party on March 13, 2006 (unless a student is old for his/her grade). In other words, this event fades into the background of our minds. I remember the story as an 8-year-old, but perhaps it was because my father went to Duke as well. He was probably paying attention to the story more than other parents of my peers although it did dominate national headlines in 2006 and 2007.
Furthermore, the cadence of the slogan on that sign mirrors that of Alabama Governor George Wallace’s infamous quote “Segregation today! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!”
Wallace first uttered that phrase at his 1963 Inaugural Address in Montgomery, Alabama. I do not know if this quote inspired Cates, but — if I were attracted to the rhythm of that phrase but did not want to tie my own new motto to Wallace — I would switch around some words. I can’t just say “Innocent then! Innocent tomorrow! Innocent forever!”
Cates took out the “tomorrow” portion of Wallace’s phrasing and put a new phrase at the beginning of the chant: “Innocent from the beginning”.
In spite of the evils of Wallace’s politics, there is a reason that we remember that phrase and why it dominated the political discourse at the time. It does have cadence with alliteration and applying Wallace’s cadence to the innocence of the Duke Lacrosse players can have similar effect. Even if Cates did not intend on any allusion to Wallace, she was taking a contrarian stance by defending the boys in 2006. Of course, segregation was not a righteous cause whereas Cates was defending the presumption of innocence of these boys, and they did turn out to be innocent after malicious malpractice of justice by District Attorney Nifong.
With these thoughts in mind, the third phrase in that alliteration catches my eye the most: “Innocent forever”. When Wallace used the word “forever”, he obviously was wrong. President Lyndon Johnson would sign the Civil Rights Act the year after Wallace’s first inauguration as governor of Alabama. By the late 1970s and after his assassination attempt in 1972, Wallace had tried to rectify his promotion of segregation. In George Wallace’s final term as governor from 1983 to 1987, he had moderated and even befriended Black civil rights activist Jesse Jackson.
Wallace was demonstrably wrong. Segregation was not forever, nor should it have been. The culture shifted away from Wallace’s old position, and he had to find a new direction in his final years as governor in the 1980s. In a similar way, was the culture shifting away from Cates’s 2006 hardline stance in defense of the lacrosse players? I want to clarify that I am not putting promotion of the due process on the same plane as the promotion of segregation. Cates was obviously correct in both a factual and moral sense, but — like Wallace — she made a proclamation of “forever”. She reposted the sign on Instagram 18 years later in 2024. Just as I already cited, eighteen years after Wallace’s first inauguration in Alabama, he was trying to atone for his sins as the zeitgeist had shifted. If politics could shift so radically in Alabama in the 1970s and 1980s — what has happened at Duke and in Durham in the 2010s and 2020s?
In August, Duke will be receiving new freshmen born the same year as Apple’s launch of the first iPhone. The Duke lacrosse case has become a faint memory. When we make proclamations of forever as Cates did in 2006 and Wallace did in 1963, we are hubristically testing fate. Forever is a long time. Sure, then Attorney General Roy Cooper’s1 dismissal of all charges against the three boys from January 2007 will exist forever in official documents in the state of North Carolina, but does that satisfy our feeling of cosmic justice? Forever transcends the capricious emotions in a jury in Durham County or a seedy district attorney heading into a tough re-election.
As Jay-Z says in Kanye West’s 2005 song “Diamonds from Sierra Leone”: “It would seem like forever is a might long time”.
The 2006 Lacrosse Case During My Time at Duke
Just as that poster in Shooters II lurked in the shadows, the story of the case haunted us students too. I attended Duke from 2016 to 2020. By the time that I stepped foot on campus in August 2016, American society had known about the innocence of the Duke lacrosse players. ESPN had just aired its 30 for 30 episode Fantastic Lies about the Duke case on March 13, 2016 .
Anecdotally, I can tell you that many of my peers at the time did not know. They assumed that those evil white lacrosse players had raped Crystal Mangum. Remember. We were all quite young. Someone in my class at Duke would have been 8 years old when the lacrosse case began. Because of my politics, perhaps I was predisposed to know about the truth of the Duke lacrosse case. I was always looking for justification that the leftist media was targeting rich, white males because of their race, gender, and wealth. At that time, we did not know it yet, but we were entering into the shocking first victory of Donald Trump and then the MeToo era. The Duke lacrosse case really served as a harbinger of the culture wars that we would begin to fight in the Trump era of 2015 to … well … 2029.
Coincidentally, I lived in the same dorm hall as the men’s lacrosse team. As a freshman, I lived in Gilbert-Addoms, colloquially known as “GA”. Duke randomly assigns the vast majority of freshmen to one of the residence halls on East Campus, a part of campus dedicated to freshmen, but the athletes of a sports team are usually assigned to the same block. The most high-profile athletes — obviously, the men’s basketball players — lived in Wilson in allegedly much more luxurious dorms than those of us proletariats, but the lacrosse players lived exactly like me on the third floor of GA. They had the exact same type of dorm. They used the exact same toilets and communal showers, and — in those showers — they had to wear sandals to avoid the contraction of athlete’s foot. Man, I hated freshman year.
The lacrosse players kept to themselves. I lived in an all-boys wing of GA, and we were all fairly close. We shared an RA, but the lacrosse players stayed separate from us. The athletes stuck together. This makes sense. They’re on the same team. They spent so much time together, but I also empathize with them in a way. So many “academic” students resented the lacrosse players because they didn’t “deserve” to get into Duke. My contention was that many of the lacrosse players were probably more elite lacrosse players than you were a student.
Duke is strange in that way. Duke is an athletic powerhouse, most notably in basketball, but it also has academic prestige. I do not think that the same awkwardness happens in the Ivy League, which is D-1 but not as competitive as Duke in a wide array of sports. The most analogous schools to Duke would be private Power 4 schools with single-digit acceptance rates like Stanford, Vanderbilt, and Northwestern.
The lacrosse players living on my hall served as another reminder of the specter of 2006. I had known Duke lacrosse for my whole life. Now, I was living 100 feet away from the boys who lived under that tarred brand and using the same, gross communal bathrooms, yet I barely talked to them. I was probably wasn’t “cool” enough for them, but they lurked in the shadows just as the specter of 2006 did.
Yields and Acceptance at Elite Schools
Before I tie all this back to Duke Lacrosse and Crystal Mangum, I want to go back to the original insecurity of Duke University. For the past three decades, Duke has made a concerted effort to climb up the prestige ladder to compete with its private school counterparts north of the Mason-Dixon Line. I specifically speak of the Ivy League. For the most part, Duke has succeeded in this realm in terms of numbers. We can look at acceptance rates. I say the following in my original piece about Shooters II:
In 2004, Duke also had a completely different student body. Duke had not caught up in exclusivity to its peers up north. During the first term of the Bush administration, Duke had an acceptance rate of 22 percent! Some students would kill (literally) to have those odds! Duke accepted me in 2016, and the acceptance rate was 10%. Now, in 2024, it’s approximately 5 percent. As a result, the students who go to Duke in 2024 have gotten way more intense compared to 2004, the year when Shooters reached its level of preeminence in the Duke campus culture. They’re even way more intense than the year that I stepped on campus in 2016. There is a very good chance that I would not get into Duke again if I were a high school senior now, just nine years later. A lot has changed since fall of 2015 when I applied! That was BT! That stands for “Before Trump” for those “in the know”.
Now, Duke has caught up with its peers up north — on the surface. The acceptance rates are similar. Duke has dipped into the single-digit acceptance rates. Okay … even then, the acceptance rates aren’t that similar. In 2024, Duke had an acceptance rate of 7.7% while Yale had an acceptance rate of 3.7%. Duke accepts approximately half of its matriculating freshman class via early decision in December. In this process, students apply to Duke “early”. If Duke accepts them in December, then they must attend in August.
The difference lies in that the fact that the students who apply early must attend Duke. As seen in the table above — Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford (HYPS) do not engage in early decision in the same way that the five “lesser Ivies” and Duke do. At HYPS, students who apply early are entering into restrictive early action whereby they cannot apply anywhere else early unless they are applying to a public university. Part of the early decision offering by the lesser Ivies and Duke is to capture a certain percentage of its yield early in the process in December. By offering a Duke applicant an ED acceptance in December, that person cannot apply to Yale in the regular pool and get in.
This distinction implies that HYPS know that they have a very, very good chance of retaining an applicant who gets in the early action pool. Okay … you don’t have to go to Yale. Fine! Go sow your wild oats in the regular pool! Apply to Duke! Apply to Columbia! Apply to Dartmouth! We know you will come crawling back to us in April!!! HYPS are almost goading you into to trying to get in everywhere else. Of course, some seniors admitted early to Yale will end up getting into Harvard, Princeton, or Stanford in April and then choose one of those other three — but this usually does not happen. First of all, if you get into one, you likely won’t get into any of the other three top schools.
On the other hand, Duke cannot play coy in December. They must take these top students and steal them from the Ivy League! Ahahaha! You must stay with us now! Don’t you like basketball? Well, you better! Besides, you wouldn’t want to be in the snow of New Haven … would you? You know better than that! You want to be able to drive your BMW 330i to Chick-fil-a off campus, right? You can’t do that in New Haven!
Isn’t the acceptance rate still extremely low at Duke? Why is everyone so insecure about their place at Duke? Look! Duke is #6 on the 2025 U.S. News rankings! It’s only beat out by Princeton, MIT, Harvard, Stanford, and Yale (in that order). Okay. It’s tied with CalTech, Johns Hopkins, and Northwestern at #6 — but really? You’re going to go to Baltimore? You want to go to the cold of Illinois? And I get it. Pasadena has great weather, but CalTech is a bunch of greasy dweebs. You don’t want to be there, Mr. Valedictorian — so Duke is truly #6!
Well, we should all know that universities can manipulate statistics to climb up the rankings. University of Florida was #48 in 2015, and it is now #30 from explicit manipulation. As a native Floridian, I — for one — am happy that UF can deliberately manipulate its way to the realm of “Public Ivy” alongside UNC, UVA, and Michigan. For this reason, what metric do I actually use to compare the “prestige” of these “top” universities? I want to look at yield, the percentage of admitted students who actually matriculate to the school.
When we compare Duke and Yale and see a 7% versus 4% acceptance rate, one might see us as splitting hairs. I get it even though Yale’s acceptance rate in spring of 2024 was approximately 50% that of Duke, but we might not notice once a school gets into the single digits of acceptance rates. Comparing the yields of these two schools might give us a better picture. In 2024, Yale had a yield rate of 69% while Duke had a yield rate of 59%. That 10-percentage point difference is actually quite stark when you consider that half of Duke’s freshman class every year is legally bound to go to Duke due to early decision whereas nobody has to go to Yale.
The table above shows the yield rate for each “Ivy Plus” school as defined by The New York Times. This distinction includes all eight Ivies plus Chicago, Duke, MIT, and Stanford. When you look at this table and compare Duke to its peers, you can see how much more preferable the actual Ivies are to Duke. Harvard has a yield of 84% — 25 points higher than that of Duke. Again, Harvard does not legally bind anyone to go while Duke does so for all admitted early applicants.
High school seniors or anyone else with an interest in college admission statistics likely does not look at yield. They would prefer to look at the acceptance rates, SAT/ACT ranges, etc. — but perhaps they should look at yields. What do yields tell us? Yields are a revealed preference. When it comes down to it, where do students actually decide to go? We can view college admissions as a free market proposition in a world where enough people can pay tuitions through either wealth or financial aid. Forget what the US News says. If 84% of students whom Harvard admits actually go while only 59% of students whom Duke admits go, then maybe Harvard is a better school, or at least it might be more prestigious.
How does this relate back to Duke lacrosse? I think that, at Duke, that aforementioned specter of insecurity haunts the students and professors. Yes, 50% of the student body chose Duke as their first choice via early decision. These students enthusiastically go, but what happens to the other half who got in regular decision? Why did they not apply binding early decision as the other half did? Assumedly, Duke was not their first choice. Perhaps they applied somewhere else early and got rejected. Alternatively, perhaps they did not apply anywhere early at all, but that implies that Duke was not attractive enough to them to fill that early slot.
Duke has likely hit a ceiling with prestige. It will always bounce between #6 and #12 on the US News rankings. It might rank higher than four of the Ivies, but — when we look at that table of the yield percentages — we realize that more students want to go to the Ivy League. It could be Cambridge, Massachusetts, or the frozen tundra of Ithaca, New York. It does not matter. People prefer the Ivy League to Duke. Even if Duke’s acceptance rate continues to decline, it does not mean that Duke is getting more prestigious in relative terms. Perhaps it was in the 1990s and 2000s, but — at this point — the ACELA counterparts are decreasing at similar rates too. As I have cited, Yale dipped below four percent last cycle.
Despite what Duke wants, it will never have the influence on the American elite that the Ivy League schools — especially, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale — do. Duke as we know it did not start until 1924 while Harvard began in 1636. As I have stated in previous articles of mine, the United States has only four nodes of global power. Two of these nodes lie in California with Silicon Valley and Los Angeles. Silicon Valley gets Stanford. The other two nodes lie along the eastern seaboard in DC and New York, but DC and New York create the longer ACELA corridor along which many of the Ivy League schools lie. At least, the most important ones do. Sure, Cornell and Dartmouth “count”, but they are in rural New York and New Hampshire, respectively. You can take an ACELA train to get to Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, and Penn.
Duke does not have a place in that concentration of American legacy and power, but — when you cannot enter the legacy elite — you can try to forge something new. That is what Stanford and California overall did. California was on the western extremity of the continent — far away from where Leland Stanford’s son would otherwise had to go to school. California had gold. Silicon Valley had tech, and Stanford emerged from there.
What does Duke have? What does North Carolina have? North Carolina isn’t very new. It’s just as old as the northern states as it was one of the first thirteen states. Since the infancy of our country, North Carolina mainly cultivated tobacco. There’s not much elite about that, but it created some wealthy industrialists who could found Duke and Wake Forest. In the mid-20th century, North Carolina began branding the “Research Triangle”, an ersatz form of Silicon Valley in California or the network of research institutions in Boston. The “triangle” was created by three research universities: Duke in Durham, UNC in Chapel Hill, and NC State in Raleigh. The problem is that — if you want to create a school in a burgeoning tech hub — it’s hard to beat Silicon Valley. Does Oracle have an office in Research Triangle Park in Raleigh? Sure … but it’s always the satellite campus.
Duke’s Comparative Advantage
Duke will never be as educationally elite as its northern counterparts, and much of that comes from location. It was in the South … a term that makes the esteemed denizens of Cambridge gag. The South was bad. It was more racist than the enlightened North, so what could Duke do? If Duke had designs on becoming an elite institution — which it is today — they needed a comparative advantage over the northern schools.
More specifically, they needed to find a way to stand out from the Ivy League, and Duke could not just rely on regional location. In other words, they could not just get the best high school students from the South. Duke would do this, but it wouldn’t complete the job. A student at Exeter does not necessarily respect the valedictorian at an affluent suburban high school in Atlanta even if the Atlanta valedictorian might be much brighter and more impressive.
Duke found sports, a major comparative advantage entering into the latter third of the 20th century. We forget sometimes that the Ivy League, in reality, is just a Division I athletic division no different than the Patriot League, and the Ivy League popularized college football. Princeton and Yale, still have the most claims to national titles at 28 and 27 claims, respectively. Alabama is number three at 18 claims, but no Ivy League school has claimed a national title since 1950 when Princeton had an undefeated season.
The Ivy League moved further into athletic irrelevance when the NCAA created its divisions for football in 1978. They remained in Division I, but the Ivy League went to Division I-AA, which we call the FCS now. This change led to the divorce of the Ivy League from new football behemoths in Alabama, Michigan, and Notre Dame. In college athletics, mostly everything trickles down from football. Duke had football, but it found its comparative advantage in basketball.
Duke co-founded its own Ivy League of the South with the Atlantic Coast Conference in 1953 alongside Clemson, UNC, NC State, Virginia, and Wake Forest. These schools went to form a college basketball powerhouse conference. To this day, the ACC has the most college basketball championships out of any conference despite only starting in 1953. The Pac-12 had tied the ACC at 15 titles, but the Pac-12 dissolved in 20242. Duke and North Carolina had the most success of these schools. North Carolina has the third most basketball titles at 6 championships, and Duke has the fifth most at 5 championships. Duke is tied with Indiana, but Duke has the more recent title with its victory in 2015. Indiana has not won a title since 1987. UCLA is number one at 11 titles, and Kentucky is number two at 8 titles.
When Duke began its basketball dynasty with Mike Krzyzewski in the 1980s and its first win in 1991, Duke also began leveraging this success into academic success. At Duke, you could have an elite private university experience with the benefits of a college sports atmosphere, which the Ivy League schools had mostly lost by the 1990s. Other schools like UCLA and Kentucky had more historical success than Duke, but — because of their status as state universities — they could not create the same air of elite selectivity that Duke could.
Duke became this unique hybrid of the social and athletic culture of Carolina, Kentucky, or Indiana. It had some Southern influence but not Southern enough as to still be palatable to high achieving high schoolers from the Northeast. Furthermore, Duke is in the South and is much warmer and sunnier than the schools up north. And you can go to drive your car to Chick-fil-a, Waffle House, or Bojangles. You can live a fake life as a Southerner with your Bojangles trip. You can also drink Cheerwine at a Sheetz. Durham and the rest of the Triangle is now the South but packaged to be “okay” for people from New York and Boston. It has become the Carolinas’ section at EPCOT.
These factors made Duke very attractive to top students who enjoyed athletics, and I do think that fact has bothered some professors. As an educated professor, you work your whole life to earn a spot at a prestigious university. You don’t want to end up at Southeastern Missouri State. You would much rather get some sinecure at Stanford, but does Duke satisfy you? Of course, it would, but what buttresses the esteem of this Southern school? Tobacco? Basketball?
These attributes of Duke might tar its reputation as an elite school. Who was going to Duke? Was it the erudite Shakespeare fanatic from St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire? Or was it the captain of the track team at a private high school in Cobb County, Georgia, whose father was an ophthalmologist? That’s Brett, and he has watched Duke basketball since he was a little kid. His dad is Duke class of 1993. Ah, the Christian Laettner days.
Brett reeks of white male privilege. Another rich white legacy gets into Duke. How riveting! Duke professors resent these people. They became a stereotype of a Duke student. Laypeople associate the Ivy League with Smart People™ while they associate Duke with basketball first. If someone has no exposure to the world of elite American education but knows sports, Duke is definitely just synonymous with basketball. The fact that these students might be smart comes as an afterthought.
I Hate Christian Laettner
In 1992, Duke basketball planted the seeds for the lacrosse case. Even though Duke basketball has way more current day prominence than lacrosse as a sport, I still believe that lacrosse has had a greater impact on Duke from a political perspective than basketball has. As Duke gained prominence with Mike Krzyzewski in 1980s, did sports fans view Duke as they viewed the traditional blue bloods of Kentucky or UCLA?
The infamous debacle of Christian Laettner in 1992 defined this view of a new college basketball dynasty. To recap, Christian Laettner of Duke stomped on Aminu Timberlake of Kentucky in the 1992 East Regional Championship of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament to advance to the Final Four. The game concluded with a Duke victory with a buzzer beater shot by Laettner at the end of an overtime period. The final score was 104-103 with the Blue Devils ahead of the Wildcats.
After a free throw, Laettner walked backwards and stepped on the chest of Timberlake, on the ground at that moment. He got a technical foul, but the officials did not eject Laettner, who continued to dominate the remainder of the game and had a crucial role in Duke defeating Kentucky. Laettner was a beneficiary of his privilege! If he were a black player, the officials would have definitely ejected him. The Laettner-Timberlake controversy hit all the important political cleavages. Most obviously, Laettner was white. Timberlake was black, but — beyond race — Laettner was a product of the elite private school the Nichols School in Buffalo, New York. Duke was a rich private school. Kentucky was a state school for the proletariat. The reason that Laettner stepped on Timberlake was because of how he was raised!
He was raised as a rich white kid to not just literally but to metaphorically step on people of color. Sure, Laettner’s mother was a teacher. His father worked at a newspaper plant, but that doesn’t matter! He is spiritually rich. The actual number on a bank statement is irrelevant! Of course, this incident spurred years and years of people hating Duke. The Laettner story has all the correct dimensions, but it was missing one aspect that the lacrosse case had — the dimension of gender.
The Cleavages of the Lacrosse Case
I do not need to recapitulate the details of the lacrosse case, but it has a degree of potency that the Laettner scandal did not as I said. The lacrosse case has a few more dimensions. Of course, we have the aspect of race that the Laettner scandal had. The stripper Crystal Mangum was black, but — because this is a story of higher education — her school might engender more political interest than Kentucky. While she was working as a stripper, Mangum was attending North Carolina Central University — the other university in Durham. NCCU is a historically black college, which adds another layer of socioeconomic division than just Kentucky does. The University of Kentucky is just a state school. Everyone goes there, but NCCU? That’s a black school, and it’s a public school! And Duke? That’s a white school!
Divides in Durham
The Duke versus NCCU cleavage also reveals a broader division in the City of Durham. Even though Duke might fall within the city boundaries of Durham, when you are walking on campus, you might not realize that you are in Durham. The city and Duke have had a contentious relationship even if the existence of Duke has spurred massive economic growth in the city, but Duke has gentrified certain corners of Durham. Other corners of Durham stay segregated and impoverished. In this battle, NCCU can represent those parts of Durham.
Privilege in Different NCAA Sports
From a sports perspective, lacrosse gives us a much stronger air of privilege than basketball does. Even though the Laettner controversy has layers of privilege imbued in it, the sport of basketball itself does not communicate privilege as all demographics play it. Lacrosse has many more barriers to entry. Equipment costs way more than a basketball and basketball attire. Usually, kids have to join expensive clubs to play. The best high school lacrosse teams come out of private schools on the eastern seaboard.
We can look at the list of colleges that have won titles in NCAA Division 1 men’s lacrosse and, then, compile the same list for basketball. I will take the top ten schools for each sport. Unfortunately, this analysis has some limitations in that the NCAA Division 1 men’s basketball tournament began in 1939 while the one for lacrosse began over three decades later in 1971.
Let’s look at these schools. In the event of a tie that would knock a school off the list, I picked the schools with the more recent championship. For example, five other basketball schools have two titles, but I picked Florida because it had the most recent championship in 20073. The next most recent school was Michigan State4, which won its last title in 2000. In lacrosse, Yale beat out Denver and Loyola because Yale had the most recent title5.
Out of the ten basketball schools, only two of them are private: Duke and Villanova. Out of the ten lacrosse schools, 7 of the them are private. The only exceptions are Maryland, North Carolina, and Virginia — and these three public universities are the type of mid-Atlantic state schools that might attract lacrosse players in high school from that prime region. The private schools on the lacrosse list even have a higher level of prestige. Three of the 10 lacrosse schools come from the Ivy League — specifically — Cornell, Princeton, and Yale.
On the other side of the coin, big SEC schools like Kentucky and Florida are not winning lacrosse championships. We cannot put Virginia and Kentucky in the same bucket. Interestingly, the only two schools that appear on both lists are the two top schools in North Carolina: Duke and UNC. Moreover, based on this data, we can easily see that the privilege in lacrosse follows the students from the preparatory and private day schools into the college levels.
The disparity becomes even clearer when we expand to football, a sport that requires many more players on a team. I know that I cited the historical success of the Ivy League in college football, but — in the modern era of college football — the only private schools with recent championship success are Miami, Notre Dame, and USC. Even then, USC is the most recent of those three schools to win a national title, and the Trojans did so two decades ago in 2004. Miami has not won since 2001, and Notre Dame has not won since 1988. No private school has won a championship since the implementation of the playoff in 2014.
Only TCU has appeared in a championship in this era in the 2023 playoff, and Georgia infamously routed them in a game with the final score of 65 to 7. Notre Dame is the only other private school that made appearances in the four-team playoff in 2018 and 2020. In this year’s first iteration of the 12-team playoff, Notre Dame and SMU — another private school — earned berths, but the other 10 teams were public schools. SMU has already lost after a blowout against Penn State with a score of 38 to 10 on Saturday, December 21.
The Gender Issue
Beyond all these factors, the Duke lacrosse case had the greatest potency with the issue of gender and, more specifically, the issue of sexual assault. The sexual assault layer made this case everything that it became. You had rich, white lacrosse players at the private school of Duke allegedly gang raping a black woman who went to the public HBCU on the other side of Durham. The story checked every box that legacy media wanted, and — for anyone who hated Duke from the Laettner scandal 15 years earlier — it confirmed every prior about Duke. However, now, these Duke kids were committing violent crimes. As evil as Laettner was, he was only being rough in a basketball game.
Professors Atoning for the Original Sin of Duke
Immediate Actions by the Administration
After the charges against the lacrosse players, seemingly everyone in power began targeting the boys before the court proceedings began. Duke administration prematurely terminated the men’s lacrosse season and, then, suspended Finnerty and Seligmann after the indictments. The university was treating the boys as guilty until proven innocent. Duke was obviously doing as much as they could to demonstrate their disdain for the boys.
They did everything short of expulsion, which they likely avoided because of potential lawsuits by the boys, although the university would have to reach settlements with them later on. In 2025 parlance, we may label these actions by Duke administration as “virtue signaling”, but people on the right wing were not parroting that term yet in 2006. I often wonder if Duke was deliberately overreacting and compensating because of those original sins of Duke.
This North Carolina university founded by a family of tobacco barons who owned slaves needed to show that it was freeing itself from that odious reputation. People often view the Ivy League as inherently more left-wing than Duke, probably, because Duke is in the South whereas the Ivy League schools are in the more liberal Northeast, but I often wonder if a school like Yale would have taken the same stringent measures against these boys assuming that these scandals happened in New Haven instead.
The Group of 88
Beyond the actions of the administration, the hysteria surrounding the Duke lacrosse case reached its zenith when a group of 88 Duke professors wrote a public letter in the school newspaper The Chronicle. Eventually, these professors earned the collective name of the “Group of 88”. Okay. I guess I can understand why the administration assumed that it had to take action against the boys, and Duke never expelled them (although Seligmann and Finnerty voluntarily transferred out of Duke anyway). As for the professors, why did they get involved?
This desire to engage in virtue signaling resulted in the perhaps the most sanctimonious statement from college professors that I have ever read. The Group of 88 paid for an advertisement in The Chronicle entitled “What Does a Social Disaster Sound Like”. For the sake of documenting this heinous and absurd letter, I am going to quote the entirety of it here in this article published in The Chronicle on April 6, 2006.
We are listening to our students. We’re also listening to the Durham community, to Duke staff, and to each other. Regardless of the results of the police investigation, what is apparent everyday now is the anger and fear of many students who know themselves to be objects of racism and sexism; who see illuminated in this moment’s extraordinary spotlight what they live with everyday. They know that it isn’t just Duke, it isn’t everybody, and it isn’t just individuals making this disaster.
But it is a disaster nonetheless. These students are shouting and whispering about what happened to this young woman and to themselves.
“We want the absence of terror. But we don’t really know what that means … We can’t think. That’s why we’re so silent; we can’t think about what’s on the other side of this. Terror robs you of language and you need language for healing to begin.”
This is not a different experience for us here at Duke University. We go to class with racist classmates, we go to gym with people who are racists … It’s part of the experience.
If it turns out that these students are guilty, I want them expelled. But their expulsion will only bring resolution to this case and not the bigger problem. This is much bigger than them and throwing them out will not solve the problem. I want the administration to acknowledge what is going on and how bad it is.
“Being a big, black man, it’s hard to walk anywhere at night, and not have a campus police car slowly drive by me.”
Everything seems up for grabs—I am only comfortable talking about this event in my room with close friends. I am actually afraid to even bring it up in public. But worse, I wonder now about everything … If something like this happens to me … What would be used against me—my clothing? Where I was?
“I was talking to a white woman student who was asking me, “Why do people— and she meant black people—make race such a big issue?” They don’t see race. They just don’t see it.
What Does a Social Disaster Look Like?
You go to a party, you get grabbed, you get propositioned, and then you start to question yourself.
… all you heard was “Black students just complain all the time, all you do is complain and self-segregate.” And whenever we try to explain why we’re offended, it’s pushed back on us. Just the phrase “self-segregation”: the blame is always put on us.
… no one is really talking about how to keep the young woman herself central to this conversation, how to keep her humanity before us … she doesn’t seem to be visible in this. Not for the university, not for us.
The students know that the disaster didn't begin on March 13, and won't end with what the police say or the court decides. Like all disasters, this one has a history. And what lies beneath what we're hearing from our students are questions about the future.
This ad, printed in the most easily seen venue on campus, is just one way for us to say that we're hearing what our students are saying.
Some of these things were said by a mixed (in every way possible) group of students on Wednesday, March 29th at an African & African American Studies Program forum, some were printed in an issue of the Independent that came out that same day, and some were said to us inside and outside of the classroom.
We're turning up the volume in a moment when some of the most vulnerable among us are being asked to quiet down while we wait. To the students speaking individually and to the protestors making collective noise, thank you for not waiting and for making yourselves heard.
Okay. I get it. If you’re a liberal arts professor at Duke, you need to virtue signal about race. It’s apart of the job. That’s fine! But the problem comes when their virtue signaling extends into denying due process to the lacrosse players. The most chilling quote comes in the beginning: “Regardless of the results of the police investigation, what is apparent everyday now is the anger and fear of many students who know themselves to be objects of racism and sexism; who see illuminated in this moment's extraordinary spotlight what they live with everyday. They know that it isn't just Duke, it isn't everybody, and it isn't just individuals making this disaster.”
Based on that paragraph, the Group of 88 view the police investigation and the court proceedings as moot. Okay. Maybe these boys weren’t “little g” guilty, but they were CAPITAL G GUILTY. They were guilty in a cosmic sense. They aren’t really individuals. Rather, the lacrosse players are avatars for everything wrong at Duke. After all, you go to the gym with racists every day at Duke. These professors said so!
In the previous section of this article, I posed the hypothetical of whether this outrage would have occurred at Yale in 2006. We could broaden this hypothetical question to any of the eight Ivy League schools, but I am picking Yale for a specific reason, which I will discuss in a few paragraphs. More specifically, would 88 Yale professors come together to pay for this advertisement in the school newspaper? I have a suspicion that they would not.
I do not think that Yale professors have the inherent insecurity that Duke professors have because of Duke’s original sin as a racist, white, Southern university founded by tobacco and slave money. Duke professors might also have a chip on their shoulders. They have to prove to their friends, counterparts, and rivals at Yale and the rest of the Ivy League that they do not stand for the evil actions of Duke, which the Ivy League obviously does not have.
What Would Happen at Yale?
Yale provides a good analog because they have had to deal with allegations against their fraternities, which play a prominent role in Yale social life. The most prominent scandals originate from Delta Kappa Epsilon, whose original chapter is at Yale. I coincidentally was a brother at the DKE chapter at Duke, but the DKE chapter at Yale boasts some of the most elite alumni out of any fraternity chapter in the country. When you look at the list of the most prominent alumni, you will realize why the DKE chapter at Yale might make liberal professors squirm. The alumni list of the Phi chapter at Yale includes George H.W. Bush ‘48, George W. Bush ‘68, Brett Kavanaugh ‘87, and Ron DeSantis ‘01.
In 2018, allegations emerged of sexual abuse occurring at DKE parties at Yale. Obviously, this is a fraternity and not an athletic team, but they connote the same “problematic” reputations. Furthermore, law enforcement never indicted any DKE members at Yale in 2018. After an 11-month investigation, Yale College Dean Marvin Chun came out in January 2019 and announced that they would not impose any punishment on DKE despite discovery of a toxic culture at the fraternity.
A review done by Senior Deputy Title IX Coordinator Jason Killheffer made the following finding, published in this January 2019 article in Yale Daily News (an independent student newspaper at Yale):
The review … consists of student perceptions of DKE events and party culture, as well as general observations about social life and Greek life at Yale. Participants described the “debauchery” of DKE parties, including extremely heavy drinking, ogling and aggressive grinding by DKE members, dirty and crowded spaces and “a contempt by DKE members for generally acceptable standards of conduct.”
Dean Chun wrote a school-wide email to students about DKE and said:
I condemn the culture described in these accounts; it runs counter to our community’s values of making everyone feel welcome, respected and safe.
…
I also offer some plain advice about events like these: don’t go to them.
Yes, the dean at Yale and the Title IX bureaucrat were lamenting the sins of the DKE fraternity, so what did they do? Did they order the expulsion of these students? Did they publicly shame specific students by name as Duke did to Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty? No, Yale did nothing that Duke did in 2006, but perhaps Yale learned from Duke.
On January 17, 2019 — the Yale Daily News reported the following about Chun’s email and subsequent actions:
In his campus-wide email about the review, Chun advised students not to attend DKE parties, and on Monday, Chun told the News that he does not have legal standing to influence independent organizations like DKE. On Wednesday, Chun clarified that Yale has disciplined fraternities in the past, but these punishments did little to curb their activities. Still, legal experts interviewed by the News contended that Yale has the power and legal standing to issue specific, harsh disciplinary sanctions.
“While it is true that Yale has sanctioned unregistered organizations by banning them from engaging with students on campus, the bulk of fraternity activities occur off campus, so these kinds of sanctions have little effect in limiting them, particularly since they don’t rely on Yale College resources,” Chun wrote in an email to the News on Wednesday.
According to Chun, Yale College will prioritize fostering social life on campus over attempting to regulate off-campus life. He added that he has already begun collaborating with heads of college and students to offer more social events in the residential colleges.
I do concede that this came 13 years after the Duke lacrosse case. Perhaps Yale learned how aggressive action towards students can unfold, but Yale also had newfound pressure because of the MeToo movement at the beginning of the Trump administration. The years of 2018 and 2019 were at the peak of the movement. Yale did not have the insecurity to over-compensate and pay indulgences for its original sins as the administration and the professors at Duke did in 2006, nor did Yale ever banish fraternities.
In 2024, to my knowledge, fraternities at Yale still play an important role in social life, a rarity in prestigious colleges nowadays (especially, in the Northeast). Moreover, I still do not think that Duke would have acted in this relatively diplomatic manner if Duke had the same controversy as Yale did with DKE (and other fraternities) in 2018 — even 12 years after the false accusations and malpractice of justice against the lacrosse players.
Final Thoughts
Despite the falsities and abuses in the Duke lacrosse case of 2006, Duke still lives in its shadow. The Group of 88 were “wrong”, but they weren’t WRONG. Who won in the end? Sure, the lacrosse players have received settlements for what happened. Duke has apologized. Perhaps, as a result of cosmic justice, Crystal Mangum is serving an imprisonment of 14 to 18 years for murdering her boyfriend in 2011. Her sentence began in 2018.
Duke has neutered and white-washed the social experience. They are cutting down on tenting. Greek life has vanished off campus. Duke is not what it was in 2006, but an examination of these trends at Duke deserve its own article. The Group of 88 won in the end even though most people may not view the aftermath of this debacle in that manner. Nonetheless, Duke’s current and future students are living in the shadow of a court case that now happened before they were born. Duke professors and administrators will never wash themselves of the original sin. As long as Duke lives in the shadow of its older brothers in the Ivy League, Duke will continue to bear the albatross of the 2006 lacrosse case.
Roy Cooper has since become governor of North Carolina. He will be completing his two four-year terms in January 2025.
Technically, Oregon State and Washington State are still members of the Pac-12, but the Pac-12 as we once knew it is gone.
Louisville has actually won three titles, but the NCAA voided its 2013 title because of improper benefits given to players.
Beyond Michigan State, Florida beats out Cincinnati (1962), NC State (1983), Oklahoma State (1946), and San Francisco (1956).
Yale last won in 2018. Loyola last won in 2012. Denver last won in 2015.