DURHAM
On Nov. 15, 2010, Duke University President Richard Brodhead wrote an uncharacteristic e-mail to the student body.

“Dear Duke students,” the e-mail read. “This fall we’ve had a series of incidents that, at least to a distant public, made the most boorish student conduct seem typical of Duke.”

In the past three months, the national media reported several stories about salacious incidents at the university.

First, Karen Owen, a recent Duke graduate, sent a PowerPoint (NSFW) called “An Education Beyond the Classroom: Excelling in the Realm of Horizontal Academics” to a few friends. The “thesis” detailed Owen’s sexual encounters with 13 prominent Duke athletes.

By the end of September, websites such as Gawker Media site Jezebel and The Huffington Post had uploaded the PowerPoint. Soon, the university saw NBC’s “Today” crew on its quads and The New York Times reporters in the bookstore; unfortunately for Owen, her “sex list” surfaced amidst a national conversation about cyberbullying.

Things got worse from there.

A group of undergraduate women on campus shared with the media the sexist Halloween party invitations they had received from fraternity members. The e-mail read, “Whether you’re dressed as a slutty nurse, a slutty doctor, a slutty schoolgirl, or just a total slut . . . ”

And there was student and community uproar when a 14-year-old sibling of a Duke student was found unconscious and drunk in a portable toilet during Tailgate, a Duke tradition of mass tailgating before home football games.

That was when Brodhead decided to write the email.

“Cartoonish” gender relations

“Tailgate, a community celebration that regularly veered into excess and even danger, had to be canceled last week,” Brodhead wrote. “Cartoonish images of gender relations have created offense and highlighted persistent discomforts.”

The e-mail was unusual coming from Brodhead, known for his hands-off leadership, and the email’s stilted tone and oblique references puzzled some students. Most just deleted it from their inboxes.

Zach Tracer, a Duke senior from Rockville, Maryland, and the special projects editor of the student newspaper, The Chronicle, read the e-mail and said it confused him.

“It’s a pretty informal way to communicate with us, and the message wasn’t clear,” Tracer said. “Was Brodhead telling us that this is the media’s representation of Duke? Or was he saying that this was how we were really acting?”

Administrators, students and alumni of Duke University have been asking themselves Tracer’s question this fall. But the question has hung above the neo-Gothic buildings of the Southern university since the spring of 2006.

About five years ago, former Durham district attorney Mike Nifong indicted three Duke lacrosse players on charges of raping a North Carolina Central University student who worked as a stripper and was hired to dance at a team party.

The accusations shook Duke and Durham to their cores. The players were white, athletic and armed with lawyers who had defended presidents. The woman accusing them of rape was black, poor and a single mother.

In the subsequent legal proceedings, not to mention Newsweek covers and “60 Minutes” stories, a hundred tales of race, class, sex and college athletics were told. The Duke players were ultimately exonerated of the charges, and Nifong was disbarred on counts of misconduct concerning the case. But the headlines of the story had done their damage.

Tracer was applying to college when the Duke lacrosse scandal was unfolding. He remembers reading an exposé in Rolling Stone Magazine called “Sex & Scandal at Duke: Lacrosse players, sorority girls and the booze-fueled culture of the never-ending hookup on the nation’s most embattled college campus,” written shortly after the scandal broke.

The story, which also linked the university to Tom Wolfe’s fictional sex-drenched Dupont University in the 2004 novel “I Am Charlotte Simmons,” detailed an eyewitness account of the hookup-fraternity-baby-oil-wrestling-martini-lunch lives of the Duke 500, the school’s most popular students.

Female students lamented to the Rolling Stone reporter that they had anonymous, alcohol-fueled sex and that money and status were as important as grade point averages. Though the article did not make any claims about the lacrosse case, it nevertheless painted a picture of a campus rape culture.

The story gave neither pause nor titillation to Tracer.

“People like narratives about sex and alcohol and privilege,” Tracer said with a shrug. “That narrative stuck.”

Tracer spoke about the Duke narrative at UNC-Chapel Hill’s Student Stores. He is a Robertson Scholar, one of 30 students at UNC and Duke chosen from the best and the brightest of each school’s applicant pools.

Being a Robertson scholar means that among other obligations, Tracer takes five classes at UNC during his tenure at Duke. The opportunity to be a Robertson scholar and study Russian history with dedicated professors made him choose Duke over schools like Princeton University.

He doesn’t regret the decision. But through his work at The Chronicle, Tracer knows more than anyone the sort of negative media attention the school has faced.

“It’s partly my fault,” Tracer said wryly. “I’m also the social media editor, which means I send out these stories to HuffPo and Gawker.”

Donna Lisker, associate dean of undergraduate education at Duke, said she thinks now would be a good time for “a story about one of our students helping grandmothers across the road.”

She’s joking. She thinks.

Lisker is the former head of the Duke’s Women’s Center and a feminist scholar. She was a champion collegiate rower and teaches a first-year seminar on women in sports.

“For every Karen Owen at Duke, there are dozens of students who don’t experience that social life at all,” Lisker said.

Lisker did not take the actions of Owen or Duke fraternity members lightly, but she said she is certainly not surprised by them.

“These women students are the top of their class. They play sports, they volunteer, they’re artists. They’re perfectionists, and they feel that to perfect their social lives they have to compromise certain values,” Lisker said.

“I don’t know if these students . . . understand how they are participating in their own objectification.”

Duke, she said, is not a place where women’s studies is a “cool” field, unlike some smaller, progressive liberal arts universities. In Lisker’s eyes, the campus is still “entrenched in male traditions.”

Duke’s tarnished reputation

Lisker’s concerns about how Duke women understand their behavior could be extended to the whole student body. Do Duke students realize they are participating in the tarnishing of their own reputations, or are they being held to an unfairly high standard?

It depends on who you ask.

Taylor Doherty, the news editor at The Chronicle, said that most students were pretty blasé about the news events of this fall and that many don’t worry about lasting damage to the Duke name.

“I think working at the paper, there’s a temptation to think these stories are bigger then they are,” Doherty said. “But look at someone like my mother. She reads the news. She’s a Duke mom. I’ll ask myself, ‘Which of the scandals does my mom know?’ She might know Karen Owen, but that’s it.”

Doherty is a junior. At The Chronicle, juniors do the bulk of newspaper work. They’re the writers and editors who make sure the paper gets put to bed in the wee hours of the morning, while the seniors get to work on more enterprising stories. Doherty has taken two nights off from the paper. The first was because he had a test, the second was for his 21st birthday.

This fall, the biggest story he’s been working on is about Anil Potti. Potti, once a promising geneticist and cancer researcher, was accused of academic misconduct and falsifying both his resume and lab data. Potti resigned this month, and Doherty thought The Chronicle’s best work was done on the Potti story.

“This is the story people should be caring about,” Doherty said. “We had a discussion in the newsroom about whether to even cover Karen Owen. It really became a story about media coverage of Duke, because the PowerPoint itself wasn’t new for students. It was floating around for weeks.”

Susan Kauffman, the director of undergraduate communications at Duke, takes a different perspective.

“There is a recognition that in the case of the events of this fall these are things that Duke students have done,” Kauffman said. “It’s not as if lies are being told.”

Like Lisker, she works closely with undergraduates at Duke. Though the current student body was not on campus during the lacrosse scandal, Kauffman said the media reaction to the events of this fall proves that the scandal is not far from people’s minds when they hear negative stories about Duke.

“Some students have this sensitive feeling that they are under more scrutiny than friends at other institutions,” Kauffman said. “If they didn’t recognize that, if they thought lacrosse was over and done with, this fall was a reality check. Lacrosse isn’t over.”

Other administrators at Duke echo Kauffman’s opinion. Sue Wasiolek, dean of students, said she still gets upset when she talks about the events of 2006.

“I don’t believe in my lifetime we’re ever going to shake that,” Wasiolek said. “I’ve been at Duke for over a decade, and nothing comes as close to lacrosse to impacting how Duke is perceived and perceives itself.”

A learning opportunity for Duke

Many Duke administrators said the only good thing about the lacrosse scandal was that it provided a “learning opportunity” for the school —  a chance to revamp its image.

DukeEngage, a summer volunteer-abroad program for undergraduates that began after the lacrosse scandal, is among the most successful — and heavily promoted — exchange programs in the nation.

Lisker said it was also the number one thing prospective students talk about in their application essays.

“We have a question on the application that just asks, ‘Why Duke?’” Lisker said. “Engage is number one, then basketball. Students see Duke as a school where they don’t have to be completely bookish to be smart. They are very socially adept.”

The university remains ranked in the top 10 schools in the country and is considered one of the world’s top research institutions. Last year, Lisker said more than 26,000 high school seniors applied for admission at Duke. Only seven percent were accepted.

“As an academic institution, the school is consistently highly ranked,” said Robert Morse, the head researcher of U.S. News & World Report’s college rankings.

During the last decade, Duke has remained in the eighth or ninth position as best university in America.

“What their students do in their free time does little to change the core academic mission of the school,” Morse said.

Michael Schoenfeld, the vice president for Public Affairs and Government Relations at Duke, agreed with Morse’s assessment.

“Look at Harvard. They have bad things happen at Harvard, but does that affect how people see the school?” Schoenfeld asked. “No, of course not.”

Schoenfeld’s refusal to indulge in the speculation about Duke’s reputation is, from a public relations perspective, a strength.

Marketing experts like Claudia Kubowicz Malhotra, a professor of marketing and consumer behavior at UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School, agreed with Morse that the university’s reputation would help it through scandals like this year’s.

“The reputation of an institution like Duke is like a big boulder,” she said. “It takes more than a few stories to chip away at it.

“As consumers of higher education, we’d like to think we’re smarter than we are,” Malhotra continued. “But we’re not. When most of us read a news story about Duke, we don’t register ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ We just hear Duke, and that gives the school prestige. No publicity is really bad publicity for a school like Duke.”

But Kauffman warned that Duke students should get used to the idea that they might be victims of schadenfreude.

“My belief and personal experience is that Duke students are phenomenal. The portrayal in the media is inaccurate in that it does not represent the vast majority of the Duke student population,” Kauffman said. “But the sad part is, they will be held to a higher standard. That’s just how it is.”

Even if the lacrosse scandal means little to students, it means a lot to Durham, and it remains an easy grab for a reporter looking to tell “the Duke story” in a few inches.

But an anecdote from Duke’s past shows the school has a history of resilience in the face of uncomfortable associations.

In 1937, the most famous graduate of Duke’s law school received his degree. In subsequent memoirs, he said that law school at Duke gave him a moral and ethical foundation for understanding the principles that guide men.

That graduate was Richard Nixon.

This article was reported as part of the J753 Reporting and Writing News course at UNC’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication.