President Brodhead's Second Interview with 60 Minutes
LS: This whole thing must have been a real dilemma for you as the president of Duke. But in the last couple of weeks you have made two statements, you've done two things. One is you've called for the District Attorney Nifong to recuse himself from this case. And I wish you would tell us what you meant by that. [W]hat message were you trying to convey?
RB: Well, let me start by going back a little bit. When this story first came, whipped up into such a big storm in the springtime, the emotions that were bred by it were so powerful. And the statements that were made by the DA at that time established such certainty. [P]eople were very quick to jump to conclusions about it. And at that time, the university said that what we had to do was to presume the innocence of the students until the judicial process had taken place. And only if it established their guilt would that be the outcome. And so all through this, we've really had to stand up in favor of the legal process and the integrity of the legal process.
I was interviewed on "60 Minutes" last fall, and when I was, already many questions had been raised about the conduct of the case. And at that point, I said that when the case came to trial in view of all the issues that had been raised ... the strength of the case would be on trial as much as the students -- That being so, I still waited and waited deferring to the legal process, until the events of December ... when the rape charges were dropped, and then before that when there was the moment in court with the sworn testimony suggesting that the DA had not shared the potentially exonerating evidence. Once we had those two facts, it seemed we really were at quite a different moment in the story. And then it seemed to me you just really had to ask the DA to step aside and to hand this to someone else to restore confidence in the fairness of the process. For me, that's the heart of the matter.
LS: Well ... you have now invited the two players who haven't graduated yet to come back to school.
RB: That's right. Duke has a rule and many, many, many other universities observe the same rule, which is that when a student is indicted for a crime that has an element of violence, we often separate the student from the university because you don't know at that time what harm ... might be done either in the community or to the student. It isn't a judgment of guilt. It isn't a disciplinary measure. And what we've done is to use the interim to try to understand the nature of the case better. Weighing a lot of things ... the presumption of innocence, the nature of the charges, the need of the students to get on with their life. Once the facts took the turn they did in December, then we had to rebalance those things. Then at that point it just seemed to us that simple fairness meant that we had to allow the students to come back.
LS: In hindsight, was it right to not allow the lacrosse team to finish its season and to rebuke the coach as [y]ou did?
RB: I had to deal with this situation as the facts developed at the time. When we suspended the play of the sport of lacrosse in the spring, again we made very clear that was not a judgment of the guilt of any individual students or the team as a whole. It was just a recognition of the fact that with all the hullabaloo and all the storm and all the very legitimate concern that were raised by the charges at that time -- and don't forget the DA at that point was investigating all 46 players on the team, and the DA had said as a matter of certainty that the rape had taken place. In the middle of that situation, there's just no denying you could not keep playing lacrosse. I said at that time, sports had their place in the university, but when such serious matters are in the air, it's not time to be playing games. You may not remember that actually the team agreed that we should suspend the play of the sport at that time. And that later, three students were indicted, all the rest were exonerated at that point. We worked through a process. The team came up with a new code of conduct. We hired a new coach and we restarted the sport. I think that was a perfectly reasonable way to handle -- a very difficult situation.
LS: Duke's reputation throughout this has been somewhat tarnished.
RB: Was Duke tarnished by this story? I mean I have to look at some facts. [O]ur biggest year of fundraising in the history of the university ended after the lacrosse charges were made. That was people casting a vote of confidence in the university.
LS: But aren't your applications down?
RB: Our early decision applications went down in the middle of the fall. But I think yesterday and today we now know the count for our regular applications. We have the second highest number of applicants in the history of this university.