Feinstein may bend over backward to take his shots at Duke at times nowadays, but he was right about Tom Mickle. Mickle was brilliant, creative, funny, and unpredictable. Duke went with safe and unimaginative. Mickle could have been the most successful AD in the nation -- the Coach K of ADs. In fact, in my view that was the likely scenario. But he could have flopped with a scheme or two that was before its time or off-base (but never unethical; that was never a danger with Mickle). And because he was so colorful, a mistake could have been a doozy.
Duke has built a brand based on excellence, innovation, and flexibility (read
the introduction to the Duke Forward campaign to see what I mean). It values the exceptional. I suspect Feinstein's argument was that those brand values should have led Duke to take some risk and gone for something special, rather than choosing the safe and generic.
Most of us would say, it's time to get over it: time to acknowledge that even if you viewed that one decision as violative of Duke's purported values -- even hypocritical -- that enough time and players have moved on to say it's time to stop trying to find every other piece of evidence of hypocrisy on the part of Duke. But Feinstein, like all of us, is entitled to hold his grudge as long as he chooses. He doesn't lose that right just because he has a broader audience for his opinions than the rest of us do.