With the rape case against the Duke University lacrosse players unraveling faster than a Paris Hilton friendship, it’s amazing - and somewhat relieving - to see the seismic shift in approach from many involved. The mainstream media have gone from digging through the backgrounds of the accused to sympathetically interviewing their distraught parents. The head of the DNA lab now admits just a teeny procedural “oops,” in which he neglected to report that he found a swinging 70’s party worth of DNA on the accuser, none of it linked to the accused.

Two parties that have been reluctant to join the changing tide are District Attorney Mike Nifong and the so-called “Group of 88.” The “88” were a band of Duke faculty who took out an ad in April, a few weeks after the case went public, to bemoan the sexism and racism on Duke’s campus. The ad included a collage of quotes from the student body, followed by the faculty opinion:

”The students know that the disaster didn’t begin on March 13th and won’t end with what the police say or the court decides. Like all disasters, this one has a history. And what lies beneath what we’re hearing from our students are questions about the future.”

Now backtracking somewhat, if still unapologetic, the professors claim that their ad is being “deliberately misread.” Of course, they say, the lacrosse players were always innocent until proven guilty. This was about the larger issues of sexism and racism.

They recently published a clarification in which they wrote, “The ad has been read as a comment on the alleged rape, the team party, or the specific students accused. Worse, it has been read as rendering a judgment in the case. We understand the ad instead as a call to action on important, longstanding issues on and around our campus, an attempt to channel the attention generated by the incident to addressing these.”

But why bother to publish such a statement on sexism and racism if not under the assumption that the Duke case involved clear-cut examples of both? If there was truly a presumption of innocence, the “88” could just as easily have put out an ad decrying media-hyped cases and a rush to judgment. They didn’t.

Now, they would have us believe that the case did not serve as a catalyst for their statement. No, a black woman (race), charging assault (sex), against white men (race, again) had zero bearing on their decision to put out a timely manifesto…on sexism and racism.

Please. We haven’t seen this sort of myopic denial since Vanilla Ice told us that his bassline wasn’t the same as Queen’s in “Under Pressure.” This is a classic case of foot-in-mouth disease, akin to telling a lawyer joke at a party then finding out that the woman standing next to you is a trial attorney. Well, you know, I don’t mean all lawyers are like that…just the scummy, ambulance-chasing types. More punch?

To a certain extent, we should not be surprised. Liberals have long taken the stance that it doesn’t matter if they get it wrong in a specific case, as long the problem still exists in general terms. Al Sharpton played the same card after the Tawana Brawley rape hoax imploded. Similarly, they may not have the right guys at Duke (if there are even guys to charge, we should wonder at this point). But if a few, privileged white boys were due for a smack down, then why not these three? Indeed, some Duke students feel that the players should be convicted, even if innocent, to remedy past injustices.

And these are the same people who wring their hands over due process for terror suspects held in Guantanamo Bay. The big difference, of course, is that you will never hear a defender of Camp X-ray saying, “These guys may not be terrorists, but a bunch of people who look like them are! This is for the sailors of the USS Cole!”

When talking about the lives of three young men, perhaps forever branded with the stigma of harboring multiple “isms,” in addition the legacy of a rape charge, it is decidedly unjust to discuss in general terms. You can’t take people to court and ruin their lives for the sake of some snippet of ideology or sense of historical revenge. One can certainly fault the players for boorish behavior and a lack of judgment, but that is a far cry from rape.

At the very least, the faculty should understand that they injected a sense of racially charged hyperbole into a situation that didn’t need the extra dose of emotion. Instead, they smugly insist that we are simply misinterpreting their words - the same words that helped to convict three young men among their peers and in the court of public opinion.

A fact to which the “Group of 88” appear to be shamefully oblivious.