Harry Faulkner

I have written about this issue before.

Here is the full letter dated April 3, 2006 from Duke Provost Peter Lange to then Duke University Professor of English and now Vanderbilt University Professor Houston Baker:

"Houston, I have delayed responding to your letter until now to provide me time for a measured response. That time has now transpired.

I cannot tell you how disappointed, saddened and appalled I was to receive this letter from you. A form of prejudice-one felt so often by minorities whether they be African American, Jewish or other-is the act of prejudgment: to presume that one knows something "must" have been done by or done to someone because of his or her race, religion or other characteristic. In the United States our sad racial history is laced with such incidents, only fully brought to light in the recent past and undoubtedly there are uncounted numbers of such incidents not yet, or ever to be, known.

We do not know much about the worse of what may have happened in the incident that has inflamed our community: this is acknowledged even by you. If these things did occur, they are of the most heinous nature and will deserve to be punished to the fullest that the law and our own judicial procedures allow.

It is also the case that the leadership of the University in whom you claim to have no confidence, has acknowledged theseriousness of the things that are known and is seeking through many venues, conversations and efforts to take measure of the deeper issues that are revealed by those known events and what they say about the values in our community. Many urge us faster action, greater efforts, intensified passion. We are hearing these voices, because we recognize that there is a hunger in our community for fuller understanding and for action. We are responding by multiplying our conversations, accelerating our search for the right actions to be implemented now and into the furture, speaking out more clearly.

That our pace will still disappoint some is undoubted, but we will not rush to judgment nor will we take precipitous actions which, symbolically satisfying as they may be, assuage passions but do little to remedy the deeper problems. These problems will certainly be easier, but not easy, to understand than they will be too repair. The latter will take less rhetoric and more hard work, less quick judgment and more reasoned intervention, less playing to the crowd, than entering the hearts and lives of those whose education we are charged to promote and who we must treat as an integral part of the community we wish to restore and heal.

Sadly, letters like yours do little to advance our common cause.

Since you shared your letter more broadly, I feel compelled to do likewise. My response speaks for itself and I have no intention of elaborating on it further."

Peter Lange, Provost Duke University