The New Year is often a fresh start. Some Duke University faculty members and administrators should take advantage of the opportunity to reflect on their actions of the past year and to reclaim their reputations.

As the criminal case against David Evans, Collin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann crumbles, the university must muster the intellectual courage to ask a critical question: Did Duke contribute to a rush to judgment by fanning an atmosphere of presumed racism and privilege by the lacrosse team?

I think it did. If Duke chooses not to probe its institutional actions and statements, it will sweep under the rug a lot of damning evidence.

President Richard Brodhead cancelled the lacrosse team's season and accepted the resignation of Coach Mike Pressler even before the first meeting of the committee charged to investigate the team's reported bad behavior, alcohol abuse and racial attitudes.

In an April 5 letter announcing five committees created in the wake of the rape allegations, Brodhead liberally cited systemic racism, fear of sexual coercion and assault and a societal privilege that preserves inequality as a basis for his actions.

A day later, a full-page ad entitled "What Does Social Disaster Sound Like?" ran in the Duke Chronicle, the student newspaper. The ad included a sophomoric collection of race-baiting quotes attributed to unnamed students. The ad was supported by 88 Duke faculty members.

Among them was Karla FC Holloway, William R. Kenan professor of English. In the Summer 2006 edition of "The Scholar and Feminist Online," a Web publication of the Barnard Center for Research on Women, Holloway wrote:

"At Duke University this past spring, the bodies left to the trauma of a campus brought to its knees by members of Duke University's Lacrosse team were African American and women. I use the kneeling metaphor with deliberate intent. It was precisely this demeanor towards women and girls that mattered here. The Lacrosse team's notion of who was in service of whom and the presumption of privilege that their elite sports' performance had earned seemed their entitlement as well to behaving badly and without concern for consequence."

Yet, on May 1, the faculty-dominated committee investigating the lacrosse team found no evidence of racism, sexism or privilege. It found the team to be academically and athletically responsible. The report hammered the team on alcohol abuse, and said last year's team had a higher number of alcohol-related infractions than previous teams. However, it cautioned that the increase might be the result of more diligent monitoring, rather than rowdier behavior.

The report also discovered that despite a perception that the team was a primary nuisance in the neighborhoods adjoining Duke's East Campus, in fact, none of the houses rented by lacrosse players was among the top 10 that neighbors complained about.

Even that pales next to last week's revelation that the alleged victim cannot say with certainty that a rape actually occurred. If this case is dropped, and many a legal expert says it will be, Evans, Finnerty and Seligmann are owed a huge public apology, especially by those Duke faculty members who used ugly allegations against the young men to attack a culture of racism and sexism that exists in their cloistered minds but rarely exists in the real world.

Normally, the predictable laments of racial and gender injustice from professors and feminists who attend women's center seminars are more comical than consequential. But at Duke this self-generated culture of pseudo-oppression helped send the three players, their teammates and Pressler down the river for an alleged crime that is supported by scant evidence.

Now, instead of issuing bandwagon press releases calling for Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong to step aside from the case, and embarking on a 12-city tour to deflect the unfavorable -- and at times, unfair -- media spotlight, Brodhead should stay home and deepen Duke's look in the mirror.

This time, the university should examine whether an obsession with attacking racism, sexism and privilege only contributed to it. It's an examination Duke sorely needs, and one the rest of higher education should pay close attention to.

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