This unselfconscious statement seems to sum up the problem with some teachers in the humanities departments today. It speaks for itself.

Are liberal advocates only morally inclined to speak up for certain people’s rights and my rights and my son’s rights are disqualified by our skin hue or the content of my checkbook? Is it fair to extrapolate then that liberal values are not meant to be inclusive of all peoples only some peoples? Some of us, in the liberal view, are unworthy or are just… on our own?

Is this the answer why, except for two or three exceptions, Duke faculty was silent on the judicial and media abuse directed at their own students? Liberal professors are not moved by those abuses when they target white, affluent students?

Why did only those who were LOUDLY advocating for Mangum …in the Listening ad, the op-eds, the letters to the Editor,make themselves heard? In a profession, where writing and speaking and advocating are the essential skill set, why were there only loud voices from Duke heard for her rights?

If not “campus culture”, if not “Liberals Don’t Care About Abuse of White Kids”…then…what?

What?

I wish you would write on this topic. Like RRH, I respect the effort and good faith you put into your posts. I appreciate your attempts to answer hard questions not just dismiss uncomfortable ones. Many of us, liberal or conservative, are still on an honest quest to understand what happened here in an attempt to understand more than this case.

I’ve been sitting on this question for a long time, and unfortunately the more I think about it the less I feel like I know. I don’t have a direct line into the minds of other professors, and I have no confidence that I can mentally rewind two years back, filtering out all of the accumulated revelations and realizations, in order to realistically assess the way people reacted in the thick of the controversy. All I can do is throw out a few ideas, and since the questions are far too general, I have to argue with the framing as much as anything else.

I do wonder about the people at Duke who took a public stand in support of the accuser and/or casting the lacrosse team as representatives of the forces of oppression and inequity. Why didn’t they make some noise as it became more and more clear that the prosecution was abusive and baldly cynical? I don’t have a good answer. It seems like it was the right thing to do for all sorts of reasons, and a straightforward statement wouldn’t have taken much effort, especially after Jim Coleman set a precedent. There’s no fundamental conflict involved—there was certainly no need to renounce any social concerns in order to insist that the case against the accused students be handled legally and ethically.

But then I have these problems with the sweep of the questions.

• Like any political category, “liberal” is a complicated label, but its most commonplace usage in the US is to refer to mainstream Democrats—the near left as opposed to the far left. Understood that way, it’s not the category for many of the controversial statements and positions that have come up in the lacrosse case. The philosophy of Ubuntu, for instance, isn’t “liberal.”
• Some of the most important early support for the lacrosse team came from the center-left. KC Johnson is conservative on academic issues but otherwise seems to be some variety of liberal. Looking at Duke, Jim Coleman is the standout. Steven Baldwin describes himself as liberal, too. There must be a fair number of conservative professors at Duke, in some departments of Arts & Sciences, in engineeering and the law school and the business school, but few of them were motivated to speak out. We heard from Michael Gustafson and to a lesser extent Michael Munger, then more than 9 months into the scandal the Economics dept. weighed in—a relatively conservative group by campus standards, though I imagine that relative to the general public some (many?) of them would be tagged liberal. So in the failed-to-speak-up department, the issue doesn’t seem to be specifically with “liberals.”
• Folks from every part of the political spectrum react most strongly to threats to “certain people’s rights.” The people who do make a point of standing up for everyone’s rights catch flak from all sides—how many election cycles ago was it that a Democratic presidential canditate was denounced by the Republicans as a “card-carrying member of the ACLU”? And the decision to speak up or not or to take up a particular case as a cause isn’t necessarily a stand on who’s worthy or unworthy of the rights. Typically it reflects some combination of personal and political sympathy, a sense of who’s more vulnerable, and an opinion about what cases will highlight the big issues.
• In thinking about who spoke up and who didn’t, what’s the baseline? How is “reasonable” defined? What are the comparable cases that show some other community reacting more sensibly or ethically or whatever? Surely there are some, though what counts as comparable might be hugely debatable.
• Nobody’s reaction is purely “liberal” or “conservative,” though clearly that’s a big component of the typical reactions. But people also reacted as alums, as fans, as neighbors, as students, as employees, as attorneys (RRH, that is), etc. The more distant and abstract Duke is to you, the more purely political your reaction is likely to be. The closer and more integral the institution is to your life and work, the more complex and opaque to outsiders your reaction is likely to be.

Thinking about the “listening” statement and various articles and op-eds and quotes from Duke faculty, it’s clear the profs cared more about the social inequity, framed in the usual left-wing fashion, than they did about the rights of the lacrosse players. Or any rights at all—whatever you may think is implied, the only explicit statements (that I can think of) about rights or legal outcomes are utterly conventional (wait till all the facts are in, etc. etc.). There’s plenty of sympathy towards the accuser, but that’s of a piece with the focus on social inequity.

A consistent and central concern in most of the professorial verbiage you allude to—the “listening” statement in particular—is conditions within the Duke community. In that context, the lacrosse team wasn’t a generic group of young affluent white males, but a well-known part of the campus social dynamic. For me, there are clear connections between the lacrosse team’s party and some of the more disappointing and alienating aspects of my experience teaching at Duke. If those connections lead me to draw liberal-sounding conclusions about the party, that’s no basis for concluding that I’ve passed a reflexive and purely political judgment. Or at least such a conclusion would be baldly hypocritical. I think the same consideration applies to some of the professors who made controversial public statements about campus culture and the lacrosse case—to assume that there’s nothing there besides knee-jerk ideology, despite years of experience as a teacher/mentor/adminstrator/observer, is shallow, politically-driven reasoning.

That’s not to excuse anything but just to suggest some alternatives to “that’s what liberals do” as a way of understanding some of the things that have upset you.

I know my comments at some other “leftwing intellectual” blogs are routinely deleted.

It’s funny, when I started writing about the lacrosse case I expected to be criticized from the left, but it hasn’t happened yet. One major reason, I think, is that it’s mostly conservatives who are still following the case and want to read about it.

Most leftists … you can’t even talk to them. They just scream “racist! sexist! homophobe! imperialist! capitalist! heteronormatist!” as if they are saying something intelligent.

reharmonizer listens. And not only does he listen, he understands. Does he agree? No, but how can that be demanded?

Uh oh. You keep that up and the PC police will be dropping by in the middle of the night to strip me of my leftist credential.

And I see what you mean, it’s “real.”

Only it’s not.

And it’s not funny.

Stick with music, buddy. You have no taste in humor. Hope you’re better at it, for your sake.

The comment he makes about his writings/comments being reviewed by outside counsel in his latest post is also interesting and I have no idea if it had anything to do with this exchange in the Chronicle, and I don’t know how many interviews he gave to them but it seems that he is referring to just one. One of the authors of this article is Thomas Bartlett, Gustafson does say “thanks Tom” in his latest post.
http://chronicle.com/free/v53/i24/24a01001.htm

Still, some on the campus wonder why the ad wasn’t more carefully considered, given the feverish atmosphere surrounding the case. “It’s hard to believe that none of them would have said, ‘You know, we need to be clearer about this aspect,’” says Michael Gustafson, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering. “The ‘until proven guilty’ was cast as a fait accompli.”

[…]

For this article, The Chronicle contacted dozens of Duke professors to ask about the fallout from the lacrosse scandal. Many said the campus was split into factions. One professor mentioned that he no longer speaks to a colleague because of disagreements over the issue. Several said better communication was needed.

Mr. Gustafson, a critic of the Group of 88,
certainly thinks so.

The engineering professor recently noticed a description of a cultural-anthropology course, “The Hook-Up Culture at Duke,” that reads in part: “What does the lacrosse scandal tell us about power, difference, and raced, classed, gendered, and sexed normativity in the U.S.?”

Mr. Gustafson was bothered by a course description citing such a sensitive topic. So he sent a message to Mr. Lange, the provost. Mr. Lange suggested that he contact the professor teaching the course.

He did. At first Anne Allison, who is chair of cultural anthropology, was annoyed.

“The very query seemed hostile,” she says. “I mean, I’m not asking him about his class.” She wondered whether she had been singled out because she had signed the Group of 88 ad.

Ms. Allison is teaching the course with Margot Weiss, a visiting lecturer in cultural anthropology. The two met with Mr. Gustafson for about an hour.

“If this discussion had happened the way discussions have been happening, I would have written a letter to the newspaper, and she would have written a letter, and there would have been an escalation,” says Mr. Gustafson. “It was better to actually communicate with each other.”

I am not certain the phrase “critic of the Group of 88” is entirely fair to Gustafson. He has been critical of ad’s seeming assumptions of the Lacrosse players as being guilty, but has also spoken out about some of the unfair accusations and treatment the Group of 88 has received from others. I don’t know in what context Gustafson giving an honest opinion has anything to do with any of the lawsuits, then again some of them appear to be far reaching in the extreme.

I believe it’s not Gus or Gus’s opinions but his communications that are of interest in relation to the lawsuits, for what they might reveal about who knew what when, or said what when, or whatever. That’s only a guess on my part.

It may be that in the context of that article, from Feb. 2007, it was fair to call Gus a “critic of the Group of 88” (though it was careless of the writers to use the term “Group of 88” as if it’s neutral). Over time he’s been much more than that, for sure. It’s also not quite accurate to call him an “assistant professor.” He’s an Assistant Professor of the Practice, which is primarily a teaching position, not a tenure-track research position. He’s an alum, too—all his degrees are from Duke. More than most professors, his focus is on the undergraduates, and his interest and involvement with them extends well beyond the engineering he teaches. I want to be very careful not to put words into his mouth, but I think it’s fair to say that part of his role on campus, as he sees it, is to look out for the more conservative students, or at least to be available for them. But the stands he’s taken in the lacrosse case have grown out of a broad and practical concern for Duke students and for Duke as an academic community. He’s consistently put a high value on honest, constructive debate, and as I said months ago, he’s a bridge builder.

I’m sorry, did Duke have an Equestrian team scandal as The Onion suggests? I have no idea what you’re talking about.

Really? No idea? I didn’t think it was that obscure, but maybe it is.