Give me a break.

You cannot find more solid and more basic intellectual integrity than the way KC’s operates.

Why do you think Stuart Taylor—-someone who already had enormous experience reporting and writing about significant legal cases on the national scene—-asked KC to collaborate on the book with him?

Until Proven Innocent was a project Taylor initially began; however, after having read and followed KC’s blog, he knew that he needed KC’s phenomenal work in order to make the book what it is—-the definitive story on exactly what was allowed to take place at Duke and in Durham back in the Spring of 2006.

Numerous other bloggers and members of the academy surface on occasion and begin their screaming sessions from the peanut gallery…..simply because they cannot quite accept or understand what a grand piece of work KC has in Wonderland.

His writing is always a rush!

Granted, it will be a daunting task; however, some really must try to move past their jealousy.

The issue for me is this: the Group of 88 erred shamefully in tying a valid and important argument about racism to a court case pending against their own students. The fact that the case was later proven to be unfounded increases their shame ten times over. But the biggest slam against them is their failure to apologize now that the truth has come out. Signing the statement in the first place was bad; refusing to apologize is unforgivable.

Against that, we have your criticisms of KC’s conduct on his blog. I’m not denying the validity of many of your arguments, but for me it comes down to…it’s a blog. It’s not reflective of his scholarship in any way. Nobody writes the same way on a blog as they do in their scholarly work. I certainly don’t — I say stupid things and make idiotic mistakes that I’d certainly edit out in the runup to an article publication. It’s a completely different medium with completely different rules and goals. I’m more concerned with what made its way into KC’s book Until Proven Innocent; one of the reasons I’m reluctant to delve further into this argument is that I still haven’t found time to read the book, and probably won’t for a while to come. So what might be the most damning against KC is something I can’t comment on because I haven’t read it.

Finally, regarding your being a Duke professor: I’m not really questioning your integrity, since it’s pretty clear to me that you’re not close to any of the principals in the case and are responding to what you’re reading online and after the fact, but you’ve got to admit that when a faculty member defends his colleagues’ actions over an issue that threatens to tarnish the reputation of his institution, it simply looks bad. You’d be better served to seek out critics of D-i-W who don’t teach at the institution he’s attacking, and promote their work; the conflict of interest really detracts from your argument in my view. Would you be more likely to listen to a Democrat or a Republican who thinks Obama’s a great guy? One has reason to say that even if he doesn’t think it; the other doesn’t. Simple as that.

Enough meat on my answer now?

A fine answer. I disagree with a number of the points—I think at some point (fall 06, maybe), DIW stopped being just a blog, and you think I’m talking about scholarship when I’m actually talking about basic intellectual integrity. Those are all things worth clarifying, and I’ll undoubtedly do that sometime. But the feedback is greatly appreciated.

It seems to me that you are just a Daydream Believer.

Apparently DuBose wants to be the poster boy for the point I made a few weeks ago—Johnson and his devoted readers are convinced that they’re in a righteous struggle against those kind of people. What’s above is an excerpt that gets the essential message across. His entire comment is on the extra comments page, with a brief response. Just above it you’ll find his earlier comment about how much smarter he is than “my sort.”

He’s probably right that “the only people still following this story are the old veterans,” and they’re not going tire themselves out reconsidering positions that they’ve been smugly harping on for almost 2 years. Johnson in comfortably insulated in the groupthink Wonderland he’s constructed, and he’s little more than an intellectual bully anyways—his typical response to a challenge is formulaic bluster and evasion. But even though I’m not likely to find anyone willing to take on my questions, I’m still going to try to keep this comment thread from filling up with harangues about the stuff I’m not writing about.

Actually, I seem to mostly hear from people who think KC is credibility incarnate. Mostly they’re not academics, though, and I imagine that’s what you meant. But still, it’s my impression that there’s a contingent of conservatives (like Erin O’Connor) wanting to return to “traditional” academic values who think DIW is the cat’s pajamas.

As I explained elsewhere, I don’t think it’s such a good idea to reduce DIW to a personal vendetta.