K.C. Johnson for the John William Pope Center: Next month will be the 10th anniversary of the spring break party that triggered the Duke lacrosse case. That incident probably remains the highest-profile false rape claim in recent U.S. history, rivaled only by the claim against University of Virginia fraternity members leveled, and then retracted, by Rolling Stone.
That both of these false accusations occurred on a campus should come as no surprise. A general disinterest in due process for accused students combined with a one-sided intellectual atmosphere on questions related to gender make universities poorly suited to evaluate sexual assault allegations. The lacrosse case, moreover, added race and class to the mix.
For Duke’s faculty, the purported facts proved too tempting to resist: wealthy, white males accused of brutally attacking a poor, African-American female. And so dozens of Duke professors abandoned the academy’s traditional fealty to due process to embrace the version of events offered by Durham’s unethical (and subsequently disbarred) district attorney.
Imagine the campus aftermath if an unscrupulous local prosecutor used racially inflammatory rhetoric and targeted black Duke students in an effort to rally the local white vote to put him over the top in a looming election. And what if dozens of Duke professors provided his cause aid and comfort?
In that or virtually any other context, so many professors taking such an indefensible position, at the expense of their own students, would have triggered policy changes. At the very least, it would have generated some hard questions, such as whether the university was doing enough to encourage intellectual diversity among its faculty and whether its faculty hiring patterns were excluding scholars whose views challenged the majority.
At Duke, however, questions like that have never been asked …
Asking why so many Duke professors uncritically accepted the musings of an almost comically non-credible accuser and then acted on those musings by publicly denouncing their own students would have required exploring the unintended consequences of Duke’s diversity obsession. It would have meant looking at how Duke’s policies created one-sided campus debates on key issues.
Neither the school’s administration nor any meaningful segment of the Duke faculty had an interest in such an examination.
No welfare reform without addressing segregation
Richard Reeves and Edward Rodrigue for the Brookings Institution: Every day, Willie McShan climbs into a beat-up Chevy van in the parking lot at the Greater Praise Church of God in Christ in Milwaukee and gets a free ride to his job at an auto parts plant in Sheboygan County, Wis. This is a one-church solution to the problem of a lack of jobs in the inner city, and a blessing for the companies facing labor shortages there.
The Milwaukee area has a decent enough economy, ranking 47th out of 100 for “prosperity” and 68th for growth over the last five years, according to the latest Brookings Metro Monitor. But like many other U.S. cities, the problem is that the fruits of this growth are not shared widely, especially across barriers of race and geography. Segregation means that affluent neighborhoods co-exist with deeply poor city tracts …
The combination of income gaps by race and residential segregation means a stark difference in the nature of black, white and Hispanic census tracts (defined as those where more than 60 percent of the population is from the dominant group). Just 5 percent of the mostly white tracts have more than 30 percent of families in poverty, compared to 57 percent of the mostly black tracts and 76 percent of the mostly Hispanic ones …
Wisconsin is seen by many as the cradle of the welfare reform movement of the 1990s; even then, Milwaukee seemed to benefit less than other parts of the state. Two decades on, it is clear that creating jobs and incentives is not enough. We also need to address the barriers to opportunity generated by deep, stubborn segregation.
The Internet won’t always be a series of tubes
Ryan Hageman for the Niskanen Center: Commercial drones are all the buzz. Drone deliveries are capturing headlines, but there’s another industry these devices are poised to upend: Internet access. Google recently announced “Project Skybender,” an effort to deliver wireless Internet access using high-altitude, solar-powered drones. And it’s not alone. Facebook is also reimagining how we think about Internet delivery systems with its Aquila drone initiative.
The major advantage of drone-based Internet service is that it doesn’t require expensive investments in major physical infrastructure. “Not only do aircraft allow us to not have to dig to lay down fiber backhaul,” Yael Maguire, a Facebook engineer, wrote last year on the company’s blog, “but aircraft have the added benefit of allowing the onboard communications technology to be upgraded at whatever rate is required to meet the market needs.” …
Elon Musk has also thrown his hat into the ring. His audacious “space Internet” initiative would use a vast network of low-orbit satellites, rather than drones, to beam the Internet to Earth. Musk’s project, which requires an expensive space-based satellite infrastructure, seems aimed at creating a super-high-speed global Internet service provider that would generate revenue to finance his Mars colony plan. Google and Facebook, whose profits rely on selling advertisements and user data, want to bring more of the global population online, for obvious reasons, and might be willing to deploy their drone networks at a loss. Whatever the business model behind it, the race is on to deliver the Internet from above.
Compiled by Joseph Lawler from reports published by the various think tanks.
