Here’s a quick follow-up to my last entry. KC Johnson has just posted to Durham-in-Wonderland his own rebuttal to Robert Perkinson’s review of Until Proven Innocent. There’s some substance to it, including a few paragraphs about the Hunt and Gell cases that go beyond the I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I rhetoric of his recent feud with Tim Tyson.
But as I sort of predicted, Johnson shows the same commitment as William Anderson to a crude “metanarrative” that turns critics like Perkinson into an open book. For instance, “It’s telling that even a Group of 88 apologist like Perkinson doesn’t deny that the Group’s statements and actions, as well as those of local ‘activists,’ bolstered Nifong.” No, actually it’s not telling. On the other hand, it is telling that Johnson continues to rattle along in the mental ruts he’s been digging for more than two years, propping his criticism up with flypaper labels like “Group of 88 apologist.”
My cameo appearance is also telling in a funny way. “As a defender of the academic status quo, Perkinson seems unusually sensitive to criticism of his ideological comrades, and therefore inclined to inflate its presence—much like the Zimmerman blog, which falsely claimed that 50 percent of DIW’s posts were about the Duke professoriate.” I can’t speak for Perkinson, but it’s probably a fair point to make against me. What I wrote, though, was that “Roughly half of [DIW] is devoted to the way the case played out at Duke.” It’s typical of Johnson that he gives my casual estimate such false precision—literalists like it best when things are precisely wrong.
UPDATE: Speaking of ruts, Johnson has put a little note at the end of his post, a remarkably rich misreading of the two sentences just above:
I have been forwarded a post from Prof. Zimmerman in which he denies that his 50 percent total referred to the Duke professoriate, but merely was a reference to how the case affected Duke. It’s not clear to me how he determined his (incorrect) figure, but my apologies for assuming that this Group apologist referenced the faculty with his (incorrect) claim. Interpreted literally, around 98 percent of the posts on DIW refer to how the case affected Duke, since, of course, the case involved three people who at the time were students at Duke. (The remaining 2 percent are posts that deal with bookkeeping matters at the blog.)
I don’t know how anyone could so completely miss my straightforward point about false precision, but there it is. And then for some reason—a lack of alternative models, maybe, or simple opportunism—he treats my comments as a denial demanding correction and apology (they aren’t). The sarcastic apology is little more than a pretense to once again slap the “Group apologist” label on me. I’m not sure why he bothered, since by now his readers must know quite well what kind of cog I am in the machinery of Wonderland. Any new readers have to take his word for it or search, though—he has apparently decided that he’ll no longer dignify my blog with a link when he refers to me.
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You own this blog and can choose and edit every word. Therefore, your chosen phrase, “roughly half” might be plausibility taken by your readers to mean something not totally dissimmiliar from 50%. If K C transllates your words as referrencing a percentage rather than a “who really cares anyway what the true number is” it is likely because he spends lots of time in his day job studying texts with real historical/legal significance.
If Perkinson accepts that the actions of many faculty at Duke encouraged the continuation of a transparently dishonest prosecution of some of their own students it is indeed strange that this turn of events does not merit any censure from him. Likewise, the eerie silence from the faculty in general can never be made to smell OK.
I would want to change the subject away from that anyway I could if I had that in my history.
What kind of cog you are in the machinery of Wonderland?
As a regular reader of DIW (I have also read UPI, It’s Not About The Truth, watched the Nifong bar hearing, and so on) I do “know quite well” what kind of cog I think you are but I also know you would not agree.
I suspect you are a nice guy. Perhaps a fine muscian but…
I get the impression you think of yourself as reasonable (per your own tag line), fair-minded, in short the arbiter elegantiarum. Certainly you object to being labeled a “group apologist.”
But I see you as an apologist for the gang of 88 and their/your ilk. You have struck me as arrogant, pretentious, full of pomp and circumstance. You refuse to acknowledge facts that are clearly established. You make excuses for inexcusable behavior. You defend the indefensible. You make straw man arguments, weak arguments, and unfounded allegations.
I had personally decided you were just wrong and doggedly so. That you were unable to be reasoned with and there was no point in trying. You were just a gnat to be ignored. Someone not to be “dignified” with my attention or my time.
But you are a persistent little gnat and since you choose to remain in the discussion and Professor Johnson continues to acknowledge you, I decided to at least take the time to read one more post and to comment.
I have read several of your posts, considered your opinions and I find you to be the one in a rut, unable to see out of it. You strick me as the slave to the metanarrative. I think you would be wise to reconsider your position. I hope, for the sake of your children, you will.
Just my opinion, you are free to ignore. Sad, that I feel certain you do ignore those who simply think you are wrong.
The Function of Dysfunction
This describes our host perfectly. We’ve provided him with hours of free entertainment. He’s not worth our time.
There was no href in that link, but it seemed like a safe bet that you meant the Chronicle of Higher Education article with that title. As far as I can tell the title is your whole point, anyways.
You did invest a good bit of time writing comments, it’s true—it didn’t seem like a waste to me, though. You’re briefer under this name, no doubt about that.
Do you mean to suggest that Johnson materially misrepresented your “roughly half” assertion in rendering it as “50 percent”? Offhand, it’s not easy to imagine how the distinction could be crucial.
You’re right—there’s nothing much at stake, so I’m not talking about a crucial distinction. But I find it funny and revealing that Johnson takes what I would call an overestimate and construes it as a false claim. It’s not obvious when it’s downright false to say that “roughly half of [DIW] is devoted to the way the case played out at Duke,” but it’s definitely false to say that “50 percent of DIW’s posts were about the Duke professoriate”—it can be checked numerically.
If I may attempt a translation of that last bit: “I do not want to talk about this story as if it happened in the real world. Comparing and contrasting styles of rhetoric is a safe topic but the notion that some of my colleages (and superiors) knowingly tried to end the lives of some of their students in a non-metaphorical way for the sake of their careers is way too uncomfortable a subject for me, so this discussion must end.”
Whatever. The force of the facts of this story have never depended on your willingness to allow yourself to look at them. This will go on without you.
BTW, how do you think this all will look about 10 years from now? No information will ever come out that will be helpful to Brodhead et al. Once discovery under oath begins, many reputations will be brutally butchered. Why would want your name on the same list as them for all time??
My comment moderation—slow enough as it is—came to an abrupt halt last night, with the most intense thunderstorm I’ve ever seen in Durham followed (all too predictably) by a long power outage.
Joan Foster (“A Reader”) posted a couple of comments here that were really part of an earlier thread, so I moved them there. It’s an interesting exchange.
Depends on the magnitude of the error, doesn’t it? If, say, the actual proportion of DIW posts about the professoriate is 48%, then, yeah, Johnson’s transmutation of “roughly half” to “50 percent” was sly and unfair. If, on the other hand, the actual proportion of “professiorate” posts is something like 25%, you’ve got no legitimate beef. I don’t think you’ve told us what the actual % is.
This isn’t really a beef, from my perspective. When Johnson first corrected my guesstimate, he had a legitimate beef with me, for sure—it seems that the best round figure would be that about a quarter of posts are about Duke. I didn’t restrict it to the “professoriate” or frame it as a fraction of posts, though, and all I really wanted to say was that DIW can be divided into two big pieces—one focusing on campus culture at Duke and academic culture in general, the other about the investigation and legal proceedings. After reading his response to Perkinson I can see why it bothers him to have the proportion devoted to academic culture overstated, since that seems to go hand-in-hand with criticism that he’s overplaying the “Group of 88” stuff.
Anyway, you can look at the original (3rd paragraph) and then at Johnson’s comments about my incorrect proportions that I’ve quoted here. I’m curious—how precise and quantitative a statement do you think I originally made?
“Roughly half” speaks for itself, no? The inaccuracy of your estimate was no big deal in its context; whether the fraction of KC’s Duke-centric DIW posts was roughly 25% or roughly half was immaterial to the point you were making about the tendentiousness of his commentary on the Duke faculty and administration. On the other hand, I don’t think that his rendition of your “roughly half” as “fifty percent” was worth making a fuss about, either, if (as you now say) the actual fraction was something like 25%.
BTW and FWIW, I haven’t read much of DIW, but I have read Until Proven Innocent, and my take on that is similar, though not completely analogous, to your overall assessment of Johnson’s DIW commentary: cogent when focussing on the main subject, “prosecutorial” and question-begging when discussing Brodhead’s actions and statements.
This particular point is nothing to fuss about, for sure. It’s part of a pattern that I find revealing and amusing, and maybe someday I’ll try to lay it out in more detail. Thanks for the feedback, in any case.