A sexual assault scandal involving the Duke University lacrosse team received national attention in late March, 2006. All-news cable networks, national network news, local television news, daily newspapers, magazines, and the blogosphere all converged on the Duke story.

The visibility seemed to catch Duke by surprise, and the University suffered significant embarrassment and reputational stress. One small informal measure of the magnitude of the visibility: a Google search for “Duke University”+ lacrosse + scandal in early May yielded more than 2,000 news stories.

There is no need to rehash the prurient details of the scandal here; rather, we'll harvest learnings from the University’s response that easily could apply to other crises.

The Duke scandal reinforces key principles of crisis management that form the core of LOGOS INSTITUTE best practice guidelines:

• In a crisis it isn’t the severity of the underlying event that causes harm to reputation, operations, and financial condition, but rather the timeliness and effectiveness of the response.
  
• Organizations are often forgiven when things go horribly wrong. But they won’t be forgiven if they’re seen not to care that something has gone wrong.
  
• Silence in the wake of a negative event is perceived to be indifference or validation of guilt.
  
• Incremental delays lead to greater than incremental harm.

(For more on these principles, see our article Effective Leadership Response to Crisis in the January/February issue of Strategy & Leadership.) 

Report on the Duke Scandal

In the first week of May, 2006 a panel of outside experts released a report on Duke’s handling of the scandal (the Duke Report).

The Duke Report offers an interesting window into how the initial incident was interpreted and handled at Duke. And it offers several important reminders to leaders of all kinds of organizations about fundamental crisis management principles. The full report can be found at: http://www.dukenews.duke.edu/2006/05/adminresponse.html

The report was commissioned by Duke University President Richard Brodhead, and written by three respected educational leaders: William G. Bowen, former president of Princeton University; Julius Chambers, former director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and former chancellor of North Carolina Central University, the historically-black university in which the presumed victim is a student; and Danielle Carr Ramdath, a member of the Mellon Foundation staff with particular responsibility for issues involving liberal arts colleges and historically-black colleges and universities.

The report summarizes the timeline of events. Details relevant to our review include:

• Late on the night March 13 and the early morning hours of March 14, the Duke lacrosse team has a party at a house off-campus. A young African-American woman hired to dance at the party, who is a student at North Carolina Central University (NCUU), reports to the Durham, NC police that she was sexually assaulted by several men at the party.
• At 7:30 AM on March 14, the Durham police brief the Duke University police. That morning the Duke police brief the Dean of Students, giving a general overview of the alleged assault, but not of the presumed victim’s race. Soon thereafter the Vice President of Student Affairs, the Director of Athletics, and the lacrosse coach are briefed.
  
• On March 17, three days following the incident, the Duke Public Affairs department learns of the alleged assault through its routine monitoring of a listserv. It is later briefed by the Student Affairs department.
  
• On March 20, Duke’s president learns of the incident for the first time – from reading a newspaper story. He asks the Vice President of Student Affairs for a briefing, and is told that the presumed victim’s account is “not credible” and that the incident is “not likely to amount to anything.”
  
• On March 25, eleven days after the incident, the Duke president first learns that the presumed victim is an African-American student at NCCU. He convenes a Crisis Management Team, takes control of the crisis response, and issues a strong statement, the first of several, to the Duke community and the public.
  
• On April 4 the lacrosse coach resigns.

Conclusions

The Duke Report draws three broad conclusions:

First, the University was far too slow in responding to the incident. In particular, there were serious failures of communication up the chain of command. Further, Duke administrators seriously underestimated the seriousness of the allegations. These factors led to a lack of situational awareness about the nature of the incident, the public’s reaction to the incident, and the certainty of a feeding frenzy once the media came upon the story.

Second, the Athletics Department did not oversee properly the conduct of team members or instill appropriate values.

Third,  Duke’s president, once in possession of the necessary information, provided strong, consistent, and effective leadership. But the report notes that he should have had access to the information sooner.

We believe the panel’s conclusions are spot-on, and highlight a common breakdown of situational awareness that leads to harm in a crisis. Most organizations commit one or more mis-steps in dealing with the early phases of a crisis, each of which interferes with timely response and contributes to the perception of indifference, including:

• Ignoring the problem: Management seems unaware and is surprised by a crisis that others saw coming.
• Denying the severity of the problem: Management takes only minimal steps to address a problem or downplays its significance, resulting in an inadequate response.
  
• Compartmentalizing the problem: Management mistakenly assumes that others will appreciate its own functional division of labor, and defines the crisis or its solution as specific to a department, division, geographic region, or other compartment, while the constituencies who matter most view the problem as an enterprise-wide crisis and expect an enterprise-wide response.

Each of these mis-steps occurred in the early phases of the Duke scandal. Although several senior University officials knew some of the details of the incident, the public affairs office and the University’s president learned about it only from external sources, three to seven days, respectively, after the incident. And although the Duke police knew about the race of the presumed victim, they failed to share this detail up the chain of command; indeed, Duke’s president learned about it only from news accounts eleven days after the incident and after the news media was already on the story.

Even a cursory examination of the details would have shown a potentially explosive mix of polarizing – and newsworthy – issues beyond the immediate issues of alleged sexual assault, including power, privilege, race, class, gender, town/gown, etc.

Effective crisis response requires robust situational awareness, candid self-awareness, and the ability to overcome institutional silos and inertia to deploy resources where and when they can do the most good. To his credit, once President Brodhead had situational and self-awareness, he acted effectively. But if he had acted before the news media descended upon the story, much of the harm to the University’s reputation could have been avoided.

Recommendations

The Duke Report also makes a series of recommendations – which it calls “lessons learned and opportunities ahead.” These recommendations describe procedural, structural, and attitudinal changes necessary to protect Duke from suffering similar harm in the future. In particular, the report recommends that the University:

• Develop clear protocols for collecting and sharing information about student conduct up and down the line.
• Accept direct responsibility for assessing the seriousness of allegations and the credibility of those who register complaints – and not rely solely on second-party judgments.
• Be more specific in defining codes of conduct for athletes and others, and provide clearer expectations about the consequences of inappropriate actions, both on-campus and off-campus.
• Re-examine the organizational structure of Duke to reduce “silos” and to better integrate various facets of campus life, including especially the academics, athletics, and student life.
• Reassess senior leadership structures at Duke to promote a range of perspectives. This reassessment could involve creating new positions, merging positions, or making new appointments to existing positions.
• Take a large step back and think freshly about the role of athletics at Duke, especially in light of the school’s educational mission.
• Continue to promote stronger relationships with the Durham community, especially with nearby educational institutions.

We believe that these recommendations are sound, and we hope that Duke is able to embrace them.

The first few recommendations speak to the need to develop situational awareness better and faster. The remaining recommendations get to the heart of the issues that provoked the incident in the first place. The recommendations are completely in keeping with the LOGOS INSTITUTE motto, from the words of Mohandas K. Gandhi: "Our hope is not to demand compensation for past injuries but to render a repetition of those injuries impossible and to remove their causes."

In this spirit, we commend Duke’s president for commissioning the report and for giving the authors access to people and information. This kind of “after-action” assessment is critically important in helping organizations understand their strengths and weaknesses, and we recommend that clients formalize some form of post-crisis assessment following all crisis responses, whether or not triggered by issues of integrity. Such reviews help assure continuous improvement in crisis planning, crisis preparedness, crisis response, and crisis management capabilities.

We will continue to follow developments at Duke, and will report periodically on the University’s progress in enhancing its crisis management capabilities in general and the resolution of the lacrosse team scandal in particular.

Contact the author.

Copyright 2006 by Helio Fred Garcia