Who's In the Market for Being Vilified?

The Powerline guys speculate that Yale's recent decline in applicants is a consequence of its brief dalliance with 'Taliban Man'. Maybe, hard to say. This imprudent episode in New Haven was pretty small beer, too small to register in my view. The Duke lacrosse scandal is another animal altogether. I'm a betting man, so I will wager that Duke University suffers a stunning blow to its appeal and its near term application metrics will show sharp declines. In the coming months, high school seniors across the land will be getting acceptance letters from Duke as well as other schools. A large percentage of those letters will be sent to the homes of seniors residing in the New York City suburbs of New Jersey and Long Island and the DC suburbs of northern Virginia and Maryland where the injustice meted out to David Evans, Reade Seligman and Colin Finnerty has had special resonance. Ask yourself how any aspiring scholarship athlete might view an offer to come to Duke to study and play sports. For that matter, given the inflamed reaction of the Group of 88, how would any male, white or affluent student view the chance to be educated by a professorate with at the very least a 20% incidence of deep-seated animus based on race, class and gender?

I doubt that many on the Duke campus are overly concerned about market forces and feel that it would be crass to apply the base language of commerce to an academic institution. Such people likely feel that Duke will always remain a jewel, because it is, well, Duke. Yet they have essentially told their bread and butter customers to take their business elsewhere. Duke's student body has long been dominated by affluent, white northeasterners. How will the population of affluent, white, northeastern college-bound high school seniors assess Duke's appeal in light of the university's reaction to the false charges of rape brought against its own? We'll see but I predict it will not be pretty for Duke . While Duke is a lovely place with a heretofore excellent reputation, in the end there is nothing magical about a college and Duke is no exception. There are many fine places to go to college and high school seniors have the free will to avoid going where they do not feel welcome. I predict it will be so bad that Duke will be at pains to avoid outside scrutinty of its admissions metrics.