No Socialists at Duke University?
No socialists at Duke University?
Deborah Solomon's Sunday Magazine Q&A with the former mayor of Bogota, Colombia (heralded for "making the city a model of enlightened planning") included this strange exchange:
Deborah Solomon: Where were you educated?
Former Bogota Mayor Enrique Penalosa: "I went to Duke. I actually majored in economics and history."
Solomon: "You were probably the only socialist at Duke."
Penalosa: "I eventually realized, of course, that socialism was a failure as an economic system. Yet equality is not dead. Socialism is dead, but equality as a goal is not dead."
Duke University, basedin Durham, N.C.,has an unearnedreputation among liberals of being a plantation of privileged students and reactionary thought. Even considering she was being somewhat tongue-in-cheek, Solomon evidently didn't keep up with the disgraceful events at Duke University of the last few years, when a false charge of rape against three white lacrosse players guilty of raping a black stripper threw the campus into turmoil. In the name of racial justice, radical students, the infamous"Group of 88" faculty and administration, goaded by an out-of-control local prosecutor disgraced themselves by declaring the lacrosse players guilty in a case that turned out to be an obvious fraud.