I know I’m supposed to be putting up some kind of “wrap-up” post, but somehow it’s just not happening. In the mean time, stuff like this comes up, so why hold back?
Duke’s African and African American Studies Department is getting a new chairman from Harvard—the devil incarnate, er, I mean, J. Lorand Matory. According to KC Johnson, who should know, since it’s his alma mater, “Matory’s damage to Harvard was incalculable.” The “was” is premature, though—he’s got about half a year to put the finishing touches on his project up there, and then he’ll transfer the effort to our lil’ ol’ backwater down south. Matory is clearly a controversial figure, and I don’t mean to suggest that Johnson’s complaints and concerns are groundless. But he’s been crying wolf for two and a half years now—it’s not very motivating.
Matory is the main subject of the latest post on Durham-in-Wonderland (DIW), but after railing about him for a while Johnson turns to an old favorite, a past chair of AAAS, in fact—Karla Holloway. Her latest transgression is “propos[ing] a ‘diversity’ crusade targeting units of the university whose ‘diversity’ performance the 88'er deems insufficient.” It’s in the latest Chronicle of Higher Education, and since the article isn’t freely available I’ve appended the section about Duke to the end of my post. [A reader pointed out that in fact it is freely available.]
In the comments on DIW, someone has taken Johnson to task for framing Holloway’s remarks as a “crusade.” The two had a funny little exchange, totally at cross-purposes. It’s so much like the ones I’ve been part of that someone else speculates that the annoying questioner is actually “the reharmonizer man parsing words again in order to try to cover for his 88 friends.” Now I don’t know about the 88 friends. I’m here at the computer all day and half the night, typing away, and do they ever find the time to call, or even email a line or two? Of course not. But it is true that I get all fussy about words, and it’s nice to see that there’s at least one other person with the same problem. (Maybe what Ralph, my most diligent commenter, has been trying to do all this time is teach me how to read DIW. If so, the secret is to just accept that Johnson is absolutely right about the important issues and then go with your gut instincts. All the words have to do is move you in the right general direction.)
Anyone who’s paying attention should be able to see that the anonymous questioner in this case is briefer than I’ve ever managed to be, and also a bit more guarded. In fact, the back-and-forth makes more sense if one side is expanded and the other is compressed, with some artistic license taken to bring out the essence. Then it goes something like this:
Anonymous: OK, is this the article you’re talking about? The one where Karla Holloway says that minority hiring has gone better in some parts of the university than in others, and she’d like to see some changes? She’s answering a reporter’s question and suddenly its a “diversity” crusade!? How can anyone take you seriously if you totally blow things out of proportion like that?
Johnson: Huh? Look what it says here—each unit should be held accountable! And then there’s some stuff about the Law school! What, do you think she’d bother with Divinity?
Anon: Whatever. Could you just tell us what makes it a crusade?
Johnson: You talking to me? Listen, why would she be saying all this if she didn’t expect Duke to get with her program? It’ll screw things up just like it did at VA Tech, but that won’t stop her.
I don’t know whether he’s just stonewalling or he really can’t imagine how a sensible person could be bothered when he takes a straightforward opinion given in an interview and translates it into a crusade. But as I’ve said before, Johnson reads Holloway as a stereotype, and the reaction seems to be almost Pavlovian. Is there a way for the woman to just express an opinion? If she’s overheard grumbling that you really should be able to get better coffee on East campus, would that mean a coffee diversity crusade is brewing? OK, probably not. But never underestimate how far out those wacky Wonderland characters will get.
From the Chronicle of Higher Education, September 26, 2008—Whatever Happened to All Those Plans to Hire More Minority Professors? by Ben Gose.
Duke U.: Success rates vary by discipline
The black faculty Strategic Initiative began in 1993, on the heels of the failed effort to add at least one black professor to every department.
As of the fall of 2007, Duke had 62 tenured or tenure-track black professors, accounting for 4.5 percent of the faculty. But while the raw number is double that of 20 years ago, it masks tremendous variation within the university. Black professors remain rare in the law school, which has one black professor, the business school, with two, and the natural sciences, with three.
Karla FC Holloway, an English professor who served as dean of humanities and social sciences from 1999 to 2005, says each unit of the university should be held accountable for its record on diversity. “There has been growth in arts and social sciences, and medicine, but in some ways that growth has arguably allowed other schools or divisions not to work as aggressively with this effort,” she says.
Mr. Lange, the provost, concedes that some parts of the university have fallen short. He says he is working closely on the issue with the law school’s dean, David F. Levi, and other officials. “They have made offers and have not been successful at times,” Mr. Lange says. “They’re putting in a lot of effort to do better.”
Duke makes sure that when black job applicants visit the campus, they meet other black faculty members — and not just potential colleagues in the department to which they’re applying. The university also is taking small steps to widen the pipeline. Duke has financed two postdoctoral positions for minority candidates each year, with the hope that it will eventually hire some of them for tenure-track faculty positions.
In 2003, Duke started yet another faculty initiative related to diversity — but this time the scope was expanded to include women and all underrepresented minority groups. “We needed to recognize that diversity had come to include a substantially broader set of concerns,” Mr. Lange says.
Ms. Holloway worries that the broader focus may give deans and department chairs an out: “People can say, ‘I’ve hired enough women, and that makes up for the lack of minorities.’”
{ 5 } Comments
Link to the ‘free’ version here:
http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i05/05b00101.htm
Duke had a plan, not a crusade, and this article gives the results and some other results from other colleges. It appears there have been some positives as well as some negatives as far as the goal Duke is striving for. I don’t know but I can assume from KC’s rant that his main complaint is that he is against Duke having this goal in the first place. Maybe that is the real “crusade” here?
Thanks for the link. The whole article is worth a read.
Yes, I think it’s fair to say that one thread of DIW is a crusade against “diversity” hiring. One of Johnson’s main claims is that it fosters poor quality scholarship. It’s a line of criticism that could be developed in a reasonable and constructive way, something he’s capable of doing when he wants to. More often it comes loaded with rhetoric—that’s the crusading. It goes without saying, or it least it should, that the crusading isn’t limited one side of the “diversity” issue.
I thought the exchange was hilarious. Anonymous decides that the word crusade calls KC’s credibility into question (again) and scratches out a few lines to that effect. KC looks at the comment and feigns confusion. Anonymous not realizing that KC is toying with him doubles down on the first comment which predictably deepens KC’s confusion. Pure comedy gold in my book.
To your point that KC finds it easy to read Holloway as a stereotype I agree but you don’t address the question of whether or not she conforms to the stereotype he has constucted. For me she’s a round peg that KC effortlessly hammers into a round hole. Why could this stereotype be in any way useful? Because it has predictive value.
When I fill my hard left professor worksheet (I keep a laminated copy in my desk at home) I find myself checking a lot of boxes when I look at Holloway. The list runs from some innocous items (not a republican) down the spectrum (a disdain for capitalism and opposition to Isreal) to items that to me are indefensible (support for Mumia Abu Jamal or Ward Churchill). Forget about the faculty at Duke and recall who came out publically against the players long after the case against them had collapsed(always willing to give an opinion without command of the facts). My list would include Claire Potter, Gail Dines, Jennifer Ho, Rachel Sullivan, Boyce Watkins, Barbra Bennet AG Rud and a few others. I don’t think you’ll be able to find any other proffesion so well represented.
Given the fact you are now covering an exchange between KC and a commenter about the proportionality of a single word in one of his posts I think it’s safe to conclude you’ve squeezed the available juice out of DIW. I suggest you try out David Thompson if you want to engage in the culture wars. Read his academia and postmodernism catagories for background. Thompson is a much better writer than Johnson and more of an interpreter than a compiler. Thompson and Johnson deal with the same themes from the same viewpoint but I think you’ll find much less to object to in Thompson’s rhetoric.
It should only take 2 or 3 hours to run through his archives. I’m guessing that you won’t agree with his POV but I think the quality of his arguments are what have been seeking.
I have addressed the question of whether or not Holloway conforms to the stereotype, in one of those long posts that’s too much trouble to read and respond to. I even boiled it down to a few main points, though Johnson has manufactured so many of his complaints against Holloway that any summary has to be selective. What I’ve found is that Johnson had to do a whole lot of whittling to get the peg into the hole. I’m sure some of the points I’ve made are arguable—it would be great to hear some real counterarguments. To say that she fails a checklist of ideological litmus tests is no counterargument, it’s just quick and dirty pigeonholing.
I’ll check out David Thompson—thanks for the link.
UPDATE: I did check out Thompson—see below.
“Crusade” is just a word with a range of meanings. There is no point in getting all excited about whether Holloways wrong-headed screeds amounted to a crusade or not.
Cynical lying vs. honest truth is a different matter. See, I do not think you would loan Professor Holloway even 5 dollars if she asked you. Because you know, beyond any shadow of doubt, that she would not pay you back. I mean, what is truth (in her worldview)? Did you give her the 5 dollars or is that just your personal narrative? Basically, I think you are trying to scam your readers.
I’ll never get past those mental fortifications to scam you, though.
So far I’m not so impressed by David Thompson. In terms of issues and material, his latest post overlaps with one of mine from a few months ago (Stupid conservative tricks). The issue of on-campus political advocacy by professors is a real one. It’s easy in the extremes—professors shouldn’t tell students who to vote for, but they should be able to park on campus with an Obama or McCain bumper sticker on their car. The enormous middle ground isn’t always so easy, but Thompson avoids all but the mildest challenges. Most of the attention is on extreme and provocative statements from the left, including a couple that Johnson found by trolling the net a few years ago. Thomson doesn’t seem any more interested than Johnson in placing the extremes in proportion to the typical, which makes his criticism pretty useless. It would be nice if he’d challenge himself to think realistically about the human element of professor-student interactions, too.
Most of the post is familiar hyperbole, and the comment thread is a DIW-style cheering section, also familiar. Actually, in the heyday of DIW I think there would be more real dissent in a comment thread that long. Maybe it’s just the “instapundit readers” he welcomes at the end. He’s not responsible for what his readers say, but since he chimes in pretty often he could put up some resistance to some of the vapid ravings. If he’s not bothered by the reflexive anti-academic opinions of people who are working from little but prejudice and resentment, I have to wonder if he has any interest in the health and intellectual integrity of academia or if its just useful fodder for a polemic.
Yes Thompson’s latest post was over run by the instalanch. He does have sharp commenters but nearly all are in accord with his views. I read that post and made my comment yesterday morning before he added the link to Barbra Bennet. In the comment sections Thompson mentions keeping a “laminated list” handy to determine who’s a candidate for a sack beating. I wonder if he strolled through you’re site yesterday morning?
I didn’t suggest you sample Thompson because he has a different POV than Johnson. I thought you would enjoy his prose and rhetoric. I’ve been nauseated by the boot licking and apple polishing KC receives in his comment section (I’m sure you can think of one such person). I’m an unabashed fan of his prose which suits my taste perfectly. Out of the fifty or so blogs I check he’s my favorite writer. Although I don’t agree with much Tenured Radical writes I also love her prose.
I agree that Thompson cherry picks his subject matter but I think that’s simply par for the course on the internet. I’ve come to realize that the internet doesn’t cater to the middle ground. Nixon’s silent majority isn’t well represented by bloggers or the communities that follow them. If you sitting on a trove of even handed centrist sites by all means suggest a few.
Yeah, I browsed a little more, and I agree that Thompson is a fine, engaging writer. He’s got a broader range than Johnson and more style and imagination. The parts that aren’t political I enjoy. On the more political side, what got my attention this time was two posts that take on Stanley Fish. In both cases he settles on one point to trash, and I find that pretty disappointing. Fish can be obnoxious and smug, but in both those articles, and in general writing about academic matters, the outrageous statements are balanced by clear and pragmatic distinctions.
It’s funny that you brought up Tenured Radical. What I’d like to find is a Tenured Radical from the Right—a writer with a good ear for what the other side is saying and some willingness to take on the sacred cows on her own side.