I know you will never do this; but you could—Read the lawsuits. They are un-answerable. Seriously. Take the chance. All you might lose is your ability to defend the indefensible.
KC Johnson never caused his readers to start wondering what the f..k was the point of a posting. But then, he never had a need to hide from real-world facts.

It couldn’t just be that I’m obscure and longwinded, could it? No, that’s too dull. Plus it doesn’t fit with the all-important metanarrative. And it wouldn’t be about Ralph. Yeah, that’s it—I’m trying to confuse Ralph.

It’s absolutely true that Johnson’s readers never had to wonder what he was writing about. His posts are all business—a combination of bland, predictable “analysis” and boilerplate rhetoric—and he was careful never to challenge his readers to think too hard.

I may read the lawsuits. But I’m hoping that the plaintiff’s counsel picks up this clever DIW reader’s suggestion that I should be deposed. That would be a lot more entertaining.

I hope I can help you understand the source of the divide between modern campus-dwellers and those of us who finished our undergraduate degrees 25-plus years ago.

I am told that if you drop a frog in a pan of boiling water it will immediately leap out, but if you put the frog in a pan of tepid water and gradually raise the temperature, the frog will stay in the pan until it is boiled to death.

As you are aware, people like those in the Group of 88 (which, btw, is a term they, not we, created), have stated publicly their goals of “transforming the educational experience” through a Gramscian “long march through through the institutions”. (We will re-visit this when we discuss your favored TNI in a few days.)

Basically, they have been “turning up the heat” on the sex/class/race pan for many years now. When we “blog hooligans” were in college, the temperature was a balmy 80-degrees. At Duke, 2006, it was 200. The G88’s ad raised the temperature to “only” 220, but that created two different reactions. To the campus-dwellers accustomed to 200, the ad was, as you yourself put it, only “a blip” — something hardly to be noticed, and certainly not unexpected. To those of us who remember a different campus clime, it was the equivalent of being a frog dropped into a pan of boiling water.

(The educational system starts turning up the temperature early, as I am learning with my children. Last year, both my 5th grader and my 9th grader were required to read “To Kill A Mockingbird” — apparently my 5th grader will be reading it again in three years, just to be sure she hasn’t forgotten the lesson. And the lesson is…? I had to argue with them before persuading them (perhaps) that the book was fiction. They each said their teachers were insisting it was non-fiction!)

Anyway, think of the book burnings at German universities in 1934. How many university professors objected to that? But to those Germans who had been university students 30 years earlier and had had little contact with academia since, what a shock it was.

Likewise, just as book burnings would be impossible for a college-educated German to imagine on his 1904 campus, so would the actions of the G88 be for a college-educated American to imagine on his 1976 campus.

We outside frogs (“frog hooligans”?) see the pan is boiling and are shouting warnings to our brethren to get out.

RRH

Nothing like the good ‘ol frog-obliviously-cooked-in-slowly-heated-water metaphor. I wonder how many people have actually tried that.

It seems that what you’re telling me is that you’ve interpreted the sensational soundbites kicked up by the controversy as if they’re typical—as if they sum up the professors who have come under scrutiny, and tell you a great deal about what students experience on campus. Despite your efforts and good intentions, I’m going to continue to believe my eyes and ears.

If you have the inside scoop about where the term “Group of 88” came from I’d be curious to hear it.