Will Academics really understand the lesson in the drop in admissions at Duke?

Duke saw a 20 percent drop in applications for early admission. What is obvious to the rest of the country in terms of the abuses the three Lacrosse players have had to suffer are apparently not obvious to the Duke administration? If it were, the administration would remove all penalties against the Lacrosse players pending some resolution to the contrary.

Duke will notify 469 students Dec. 15 of their early acceptances to the Class of 2011, officials announced Thursday.

The number of accepted students is in line with last year's 467, even though the number of early-decision applicants declined by nearly 20 percent.

Christoph Guttentag, dean of undergraduate admissions, said the decline could be attributed to a combination of causes, but cited media coverage of the lacrosse case as a likely contributing factor.

"We all would have been surprised if there had been no effect from any of the publicity," he said.

Guttentag said, however, that the quality of accepted students-based on six factors including standardized test scores, academic performance and letters of recommendation-remains as strong as those accepted early last year.

He added that the admissions office does not aim to fill a certain number of spots in a class through early decision, but instead bases acceptance on applicant quality.

"The fact that we admitted the same number was not by design," Guttentag said. "What we planned to do was just admit the most compelling applicants… and in that respect there's no difference between this year's early-decision admits and last year's early-decision admits."

Guttentag added that he spent more time this year than last year reviewing decisions.

"I wanted to be careful this year with the decisions that we were making," he said. "I wanted to make sure as well as we could that we've gotten all the decisions as right as we could get them." . . . .

I also heard on the radio today that the woman who had accused the players of rape now says that she couldn't testify for certain whether she was raped. After the number of times she said that she had been raped, is this serious? It is good that the rape charges were dropped on Friday, but the case on the kidnapping and sexual assault charges seem non-existant.