Even with a multibillion-dollar endowment fund, describing Duke University as having an embarrassment of riches and resources is an understatement.
Googling results for “notable Duke graduates” will yield a cornucopia of world and national leaders in virtually every field, more than a dozen Nobel laureates, two heads of state, and dozens of White House staffers, cabinet members, U.S. senators, mayors, and judges, along with members of royal families, diplomats, literary figures, educators, scientists, military leaders, artists, entertainers, and prominent athletes.
But every now and then, a clunker matriculates from the elite private school in the western shadow of downtown Durham, and this year, many of those clunkers have made national headlines for reasons more akin to maliciously killing light rail than to developing a miraculous treatment to cure a rare disease.
With apologies to the old TV comedy series The Dukes of Hazzard, the INDY presents its 2022 list of the hazards of Duke—the 10 Duke University alumni who’ve been the most notoriously newsworthy this year. To paraphrase Hazzard County sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane, “There’s a flaw in the slaw (or 10).”
10. Andrew Giuliani
Weighing in at the 10th spot is Giuliani, who was trounced in the primaries this year in his run for governor of New York. Never mind Rudy, his hair-bleeding, Big Lie–spouting lawyer daddy; Andrew Giuliani was a 22-year-old duffer in 2008 when he sued Duke University after he was cut from the school’s golf team. He’s a frequent golfing partner of Trump, and a story about Giuliani Jr.’s lawsuit published in the Intelligencer asserted that “Duke is the place where asshole New Yorkers and New Jerseyans send their most hated children to befoul the South.” If the golf shoe fits …
9. Michael Peterson
Life since 2003 has not been a crystal staircase for former newspaper columnist, novelist, and Durham mayoral candidate Michael Peterson. That was the year Peterson was convicted of murdering his wife, Kathleen, who was found unconscious at the bottom of the stairs in the couple’s Forest Hills home. Released in 2011 and placed under house arrest, Peterson took an Alford plea in 2017 and was freed from prison with credit for time served. This year, of course, we were lucky enough to witness the debut of the HBO miniseries The Staircase, in which riveting performances by Colin Firth and Toni Collette put the most notorious spectacle of the erstwhile Lothario’s life on full blast. Peterson, for his part, blasted the series’ “egregious fabrications” and claimed its director “pimped out” his family.
8. Tim Cook
Look, we all love Apple, and Apple loves us (read: our money), but Apple’s been acting atrociously of late. First of all, there’s the ongoing antitrust lawsuit between Apple and Epic Games, where local tech star Epic, rightfully in our mind, is claiming Apple’s App Store is functioning as a veritable monopoly by refusing to sell Epic products, such as popular video game Fortnite, on its platform without taking a massive 30 percent commission. Then there are the reports of similar shenanigans in China, where Apple’s App Store, as reported by Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr, is all too happy to acquiesce to requests to censor apps at the behest of China’s Communist Party in ways that could be endangering Chinese citizens. We’re laying all of this squarely at the feet of Apple CEO and Duke business school graduate Tim Cook, who’s fighting Epic tooth and nail and who’s aiding Chinese censorship at the same time as he’s giving DC speeches about Apple’s commitment to running the App Store in ways that promote human rights, civil liberties, and privacy.
7. Kenneth Starr
In 1994, Starr, a Duke Law School graduate, was appointed by the DC Circuit Court of Appeals to investigate the Whitewater scandal, which right-wingers hoped would criminally implicate Bill and Hillary Clinton in the suicide of White House counsel Vincent Foster or, hell, anything for that matter. In 1998, the Starr Report would lead to the U.S. House’s impeachment of President Clinton for perjury and the cover-up of his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Clinton was acquitted and, to Starr’s credit and undoubtedly to the chagrin of Clinton haters everywhere, he expressed regret for his role in the investigation. Equally damning is Starr’s role in the Baylor University scandal in which university officials—Starr was president and chancellor at the time—mishandled more than a dozen allegations from women of sexual assault at the hands of members of the school’s football team. Starr resigned from Baylor in 2016. Not one to go out quietly, Starr joined the Trump legal team in 2020 to defend the president in his U.S. Senate impeachment trial. Starr died this year, in September, at age 76.
6. Kyrie Irving
Teasel Muir-Harmony, curator of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, was on NPR just the other day celebrating a historic photo of Earth taken by Apollo 17 astronauts in 1972 as they made humanity’s ultimate trip to the moon. The photo shows a blue marble, but up until a couple of years ago, there was no convincing erstwhile Duke basketball standout Kyrie Irving that Earth’s not flat. Irving made news at the end of last year for more antiscience views and for refusing to take the COVID-19 vaccine, but the “hilarity” didn’t stop there. Last month, the Brooklyn Nets star shared a link to an anti-Semitic video on his social media, just as it was being reported that the number of anti-Semitic incidents in the United States hit a record high over the last year. Coming to his defense? None other than rapidly spiraling rapper Kanye West. Perhaps Irving should have spent a second year at Duke instead of bouncing to the NBA in 2011.
5. Morris Jackson “Mo” Brooks
U.S. representative from Alabama and failed U.S. Senate candidate Morris Jackson “Mo” Brooks is a founding member of the far-right Freedom Caucus. Given his opposition to measures that are popular with most Americans, maybe Brooks’s nickname should be “No Mo.” You know, as in “No Mo” federal funding to Planned Parenthood, “No Mo” recognition of same-sex marriage or U.S. veterans’ service, “No Mo” funding to prevent opioid abuse in rural areas, and “No Mo” support for pregnant women in custody (and most of these were “no” votes just from December!). But aside from his embarrassing votes in Congress, it also emerged this month that, according to text messages between Brooks and Mark Meadows, Brooks is purportedly “the ringleader” of congressional Republicans’ efforts to overturn the 2020 election, along with other such GOP luminaries as Ralph Norman, Ted Cruz, Jim Jordan, and Marjorie Taylor Greene. If he has one saving grace, at least, Brooks didn’t have to suffer the indignity of being caught on text botching the spelling of “martial law.”
4. Rand Paul
The blind eyes of justice and global warming be damned: ophthalmologist and early Tea Party movement supporter U.S. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky opposed President Barack Obama’s right to nominate a U.S. Supreme Court justice following the death of Justice Antonin Scalia—which left us with our currently dire situation on SCOTUS—and was one of 22 senators who signed a letter in 2017 urging President Trump to withdraw from the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, which Trump promptly did. Paul, ostensibly a doctor, has opposed the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare; insists the 2020 election was stolen; and finds same-sex marriage offensive. Paul’s biggest contribution to the discourse this year, after he was reelected to the Senate during the midterms, has been joining Elon Musk in demanding congressional investigations into, and prosecution of, retiring public health expert Dr. Anthony Fauci over his COVID-19 policies.
3. Eric R. Greitens
A Rhodes Scholar, a Bronze Star and Purple Heart recipient, and a former U.S. Navy Seal, Duke Honor Council founding member Eric R. Greitens served as governor of Missouri from January 2017 until June 2018, when he resigned following accusations of sexually assaulting his hairdresser, plus allegations of campaign finance improprieties. On April 11, 2018, members of a Missouri House Special Investigative Committee on Oversight issued a report that found Greitens’s hairdresser to be “a credible witness” after she described her worrisome encounter with the former governor at his home, reportedly while his pregnant wife was away. Greitens mounted a comeback bid to become a U.S. senator for Missouri this year but lost handily to that state’s attorney general, Eric Schmitt, in the Republican primary despite running a series of deranged political ads depicting him brandishing assault weapons and seemingly calling for right-wing vigilante violence. Somehow, we doubt we’ve seen the last of Eric Greitens.
2. Richard B. Spencer
An American neo-Nazi, anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist, white separatist, supporter of ethnic cleansing and the enslavement of Haitians by the U.S. military, and a featured speaker at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia—the less said about Spencer is clearly the better. He’s the man who coined the term “alt-right” and described Martin Luther King Jr. as “a fraud and degenerate.” Spencer has laid low since his spectacular downfall last year, which included being shunned by his entire hometown, losing work, his wife divorcing him, and ending up too broke to hire a trial lawyer. But Spencer is apparently trying to get himself out there again, as he popped up in a Jezebel report this summer in which he told the website’s editor—who ran across him on the dating app Bumble—that he’s “no longer a white supremacist” and asked that she respect his privacy.
1. Stephen Miller
Born into a Jewish family whose ancestors emigrated to the United States in 1903 to escape the Russian Empire’s anti-Jewish pogroms, Stephen Miller—who bears an uncanny resemblance to chief Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels—made the extremist list of the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2020. A chief Trump adviser and the architect of the family separation policy, Miller was instrumental in crafting the administration’s other notably xenophobic schemes, including the Muslim travel ban and the reduction in the number of refugees accepted into the nation for asylum. In the run-up to this year’s midterm elections, Miller’s nonprofit America First Legal Foundation, which bills itself as “the long-awaited answer to the ACLU,” was accused of sending race-baiting mailers to Asian Americans in an attempt to suppress the group’s vote. And in court last month, America First’s legal team successfully argued that President Biden’s $4 billion stimulus package aiding Black farmers to make amends for decades of discrimination “racially discriminated against white farmers”—so now the deal is officially dead.
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