It’s time for me to stop the endless picking apart of KC Johnson’s blog, Durham-in-Wonderland (DIW). In fact it was probably time a few months ago. I’ll never reach the level of the poor sap who’s spent years defaming Brian Leiter, but I might end up on par with the one who got a bad review from Richard Brodhead years ago and is now relishing an endless scholarly vendetta. I’ve got a wrap-up post mostly written, but first there are a few loose ends to deal with. In addition to the case-by-case fudging that I sampled in the last post, there are two fairly constant factors that help to make the Wonderland narrative such an uninformative but judgmental thing. One is the regular rhetorical nudges Johnson uses to get his readers to see things his way. The other is his uncritical reliance on secondhand information.
The highest concentration of intelligent criticism that I know of, pro and con, focussed on DIW is on Scott Eric Kaufman’s blog Acephalous—four posts from last fall, each followed by an astonishingly long comment thread with some very sharp participants, including Kaufman, Ralph Luker, Timothy Burke, and Steven Horwitz. Johnson chimes in with a useful response now and then, too. It’s an academic crowd, and there’s plenty of shop talk, kicking around things like faculty publication records and the significance of publishing with Duke University Press vs. some other academic press. But many of the broader issues raised by Johnson’s blog come up for unusually thoughtful consideration.
In his posts, Kaufman picks out several passages from DIW in order to point out a kind of manipulative criticism that he calls Horowitizian (“intentionally withholding profession-specific information when speaking before a general audience in order to incite it to commit acts of rhetorical violence”). It’s basically bullshitting by omission, and Kaufman’s detail-oriented look at Johnson’s Horowitzian attacks on Joseph Harris would fit right in with the bullshit I listed in my last post.
I appreciate Kaufman’s attention to the mechanics of Johnson’s argument and the details of his language. It’s a kind of analysis that I’m drawn to, though it seems to do nothing but mystify my readers. Digging into “evidence” in that way is not a problem. There’s no shortage of interest in elaborate dissections of the “listening” statement, for example, I think because it’s seen as the smoking gun that revealed the true nature of the faculty members who endorsed it—it’s been invested with a lot of significance. If I argue against the conventional wisdom about that ad, I can depend on lots of responses. On the other hand, when I’ve gone through Johnson’s evidence and conclusions point by point and found misrepresentation, shoddy reasoning, and underhanded rhetoric, I’ve heard very little. One post that I consider pretty damning got no response at all. I don’t mean this as an indictment—Kaufman’s attention to detail didn’t carry over into his comment threads, either. It makes perfect sense that the debate should gravitate towards hot-button issues, judgments about guilt and innocence, and rhetorical tone. That’s what happens here, and it’s what happened on Acephalous. Nonetheless, it seems to me that the real measure of DIW is in the details—deception and manipulation is awfully easy to come by.
Besides the evidence that so often turns out to be bullshit, there’s a whole lot of rhetorical inflection. Kaufman points out in a comment addressed to Johnson that “when you insert ‘[naturally]’ into any quoted material having to do with race/class/gender, you’re playing to a very particular crowd” (see, for example, the DIW posts on Joseph Harris and Sally Deutch). With his focus on the arcane “profession-specific information” in DIW, Kaufman is looking at the tip of the iceberg—Johnson constantly refers to race/class/gender this or that without the [naturally], and on the other hand his text is sprinkled liberally with “of course,” an expletive that does the same work as naturally. Overall he’s anything but subtle with his expletives—“as usual,” “no doubt,” “after all,” “in fact,” and “indeed” also get a good workout (and of course there are more where those came from). But Kaufman is right that with “[naturally]”, Johnson signals that he’s producing fodder and not analysis.
It’s too bad Kaufman didn’t do more analysis along the same lines, since it seems to be right up his academic alley. It’s not my area of expertise at all, but as I’ve read DIW I’ve become more and more aware of how much attitude and interpretation is telegraphed by the rhetoric. I’ve written about a few examples. One is from a DIW post about a public forum that got preachy about Duke’s “culture of crassness” but featured a professor whose DIW profile is notably crass. According to Johnson, it’s an irony that’s “worth pondering.” When it comes up again a few months later, it’s “worth remembering.” It turns out that Johnson flags a lot of things that are worth remembering, or else worth recalling or considering or pondering or noting or asking or pointing out. My feeling is that it’s worth asking why the remembering or considering or whatever is worth doing, and also why the readers need so much prompting to do it. The heavy hinting says a lot about what Johnson really wants to communicate, and about his willingness to ride herd on his readers, to keep them on the same page as him, so to speak.
Johnson’s most characteristic rhetorical tic is his habit of referring to people as “the same so-and-so who….” Even more than signposting everything that’s “worth remembering,” it’s a courtroom affectation—added proof that Johnson is more prosecutor than analyst. There’s a post about the Michael Vick scandal that bring this out because the rhetoric is switched on abruptly near the end. It’s a survey of the many references to the lacrosse case in articles about the Vick case, under the general heading of lessons learned. Most of the way through it’s a straightforward and informative analysis—a welcome break from the usual polemic. Then comes the last section, about “those who seemed to learn nothing from the Duke case,” especially “the same Lester Munson.” That part seems to be addressing the ladies and gentlemen of the jury.
The formula isn’t applied to professors as much as others—for some reason former Durham city manager Patrick Baker is a favorite target. But “Yes, this is the same Orin Starn who…,” and “This is, after all, the same Grant Farred who…,” and “This, of course, is the same William Chafe who…” (as you can see, there’s usually a heavy-handed expletive thrown in, as if the message wasn’t clear enough already). What follows is some transgression that same person committed. It might or might not be relevant to the discussion at hand, but either way it’s a reminder of what kind of person is being discussed. The prime offenders get a whole rap sheet in bullet points—“the same Karla Holloway” (this one, too) and “the same Wahneema Lubiano” (and again). Is there really another Wahneema Lubiano? It’s hard to imagine.
Rhetorical signals like “of course” telegraph an understanding of the material by marking the things that are routine and undeniable. “The same so-and-so” sends a similar message—something about the routine or inevitable behavior of the offender who’s been singled out. I’ve written a little about one of the saming attacks against Lubiano. In that case the message is that if she could do the things on this list, how could anyone doubt that she truly believed that the lacrosse players were “perfect offenders,” and also what kind of nutcase would criticize KC Johnson instead of her? Logically it’s an elaborate non sequitur, but then one reason rhetoric has a bad reputation is that it’s so good at glossing over faulty logic. In DIW it compliments the bullshit evidence—both allow Johnson to take a foregone conclusion and build something that looks like a line of reasoning supporting it. It gets the message across to anyone with ears for it, that’s for sure. But the constant rhetorical cueing strikes me as reflexive. That makes it a pretty good window onto the thought process behind the words, and it looks like Johnson has spent a lot of time trudging up and down the same narrow mental corridors, watching the same one-dimensional characters do their senseless but predictable thing.
DIW wasn’t written in Durham. Very little of it is the product of first-hand experience or investigation. The raw material is mostly texts of one kind or another—news reports, essays, editorials, press releases, blog posts, email, CVs, syllabi, Duke’s (or Durham’s) routine documentation of it’s own institutional structure and history, etc. The criminal investigation produced its own quintessential sort of evidence, but most of us—and as far as I can tell that includes Johnson—still got it second-hand, as news or some other kind of write-up. I don’t see any big problems with his treatment of the criminal evidence, though I haven’t really looked. On the academic side of the analysis there are a few odds and ends besides text—some photographs, for instance, and the audio and video in radio and TV news reports—and it’s my sense that he had local sources who relayed their impressions. Presumably he learned things in his visits to Durham and in the interviews he conducted for his book, and some of that filtered into the blog. Based on the source notes, the bulk of the interviews were with people affiliated with the lacrosse team or else on it. It’s hard to imagine he ended up with anything that could remotely substitute for his lack of firsthand experience with the campus and the city in the grip of the scandal.
I’ve found no indication that Johnson questions much of anything as long as it sounds right and can be passed off as legitimate news. Every now and then he reveals what uncritical or even opportunistic faith he has in the stream of second-hand information he mines for evidence. In a January 2007 editorial, Cathy Davidson claims to have been “listening to the anguish of students who felt demeaned by racist and sexist remarks swirling around in the media and on the campus quad in the aftermath of what happened on March 13 in the lacrosse house.” Johnson flatly dismisses the claim—the only nasty remarks he heard about went in the other direction. There are clear signs that in the 9 months before writing her editorial, Davidson might have lost track of what happened when, so a healthy dose of skepticism is justified. But it still seems rash to say that someone who was on the scene couldn’t have heard what they say they heard because nothing like that was reported on the news. And I think it’s also unrealistic to imagine that all the nasty rhetoric was flowing in one direction.
The potbanger’s “Castrate” banner is an artifact of the case that an honest critic has to approach with extra care. It stands out as especially provocative, even in comparison to the other angry, judgmental slogans from the protest, and unlike those other slogans, nobody was talking about it until about six months after the event (that’s based on what I found in DIW, Liestoppers, and other blogs and boards). Johnson didn’t pick up on it until January 2007, when, with no explanation or analysis, he started using it for character-assassinating insinuation (Cathy Davidson was the first target). There has to be a lot of story behind that banner—how did it end up at the protest? where and how long was it displayed? why didn’t it crop up in discussions of the case until a picture of it appeared on Liestoppers in Nov. 2006? (My big question, which goes beyond basic context, is how the hell it was rationalized.) None of that gets a moment’s attention on DIW. The picture exists, and it seems that any further exploration would be irrelevant, or a distraction, and might even make it harder to stigmatize the people Johnson really wants to get—professors, not protesters. So Johnson’s approach to this especially hot piece of evidence is to cultivate ignorance, and it’s not the only time he does that. How much more anti-intellectual can you get?
There’s a revealing statement in Johnson’s response to some of those points: “This protest was covered on all four Triangle TV stations (with live shots on at least two). It appears now as if you’re suggesting that the contemporaneous press coverage of the potbangers somehow might have fooled the Group….” Besides the fact that I never made a claim even remotely like that, the idea that the 88 professors who signed the “listening” statement were sitting around watching the local TV news is laughable. It is to me, at least, and I know the reaction may say more about me than anything else, but I can’t image why anyone with half a brain would voluntarily watch that stuff. Anyway, I don’t see any signs that it occurs to Johnson there’s a question—his attitude seems to be that if he gets his information that way, everyone else does, too (or they should). It’s an assumption that simplifies things quite a bit, especially if you want to say what a bunch of other people should have known and can be held responsible for.
Only so much reality can fit into a news report, no matter what the medium, and it will inevitably be colored by a whole range of technical, institutional, and personal limitations and biases (his approach to the TV news story that quoted Brodhead about what’s “bad enough” is another example). Johnson has observed events in Durham through a lens that naturally emphasizes outrage and scandal and sublimates whatever’s mundane and ambiguous. As far as I can tell he doesn’t bother himself about the problems of working from such a mediated version of reality. To uncritically accept so much prefiltering is intellectually indefensible, not to mention lazy. It’s also expedient, but I think it’s fair to expect a little more mental fortitude from a man with a PhD in history.
This kind of mental laziness is one of the big factors contributing to lacrosse-case tunnel vision, a syndrome that leads people to draw sweeping conclusions about Duke and Durham based on their highly charged but generally second-hand impressions of a speck called the Duke lacrosse case. I’ve noted several times how much much more cogent and grounded criticism tends to be when it comes from people who were on the scene. There are exceptions, but usually there’s a sense of proportion that comes with firsthand experience of the place and time. That’s not the kind of thing you should expect in Wonderland, though.
{ 18 } Comments
You don’t get over your visit to our little site, do you?
I liked the site, and the web’s all about linking.
As far as it goes, your latest posting does not much inspire me to argue or disagree. That KC Johnson used arguments more suited to a courtroom than an Academic Journal is true enough. My lack of excitement over this point is connected to the fact that DIW was never presented as anything but a polemic in the public brawl that the Duke Lax Case soon became. One could argue that KC transgressed by attacking fellow Acadenicians in a way that was inconsistent with the standards generally accepted within the Academic Profession. One could also argue that his targets were themselves first to step into this brawl with contributions that were distinctly incompatible with notions of schlarly detachment, caution, and fair play.
The sum total and effect of attitudes and comments at Duke as a whole regarding this matter in the Spring of 06 is course unmeasurable by any means at all. Pictures of demonstrators and signed statements (like the infamous ad from the 88) have a way of lasting longer than dormroom declarations and so can make a disportionate impact on longer term impressions.. It never occurred to me that I knew what it was really like there at the time.
But I do tend to trust my instincts. And by that I mean that certain kernels of information, if undisputed, can tell where the truth lies better than a mountain of details. For example, in this case I found myself completely rivetted by the information that M. Nifong had refused a request by the defense lawyers to allow Mangums cell phone to be checked in regard to the 5 or 6 calls she had made around the time of the alleged crime. Here were defense lawyers wanting to uncover critical information and the proscecutors wanting to keep it hidden. I waited a few newscycles for the story to be confirmed and when it was my guts were sure of the basics of this story and I was more than willing to take sides..
From then on, as far as I was concerned, Nifong and anyone on his side were loathsome reptiles who would persecute kids they knew were innocent.
As I have said before, if someone at Duke had other things to worry about and simply went about their business - fine. We all do that. We all have to ignore most of the tragedy and pain that is right around us or go crazy. But a lot of folks there commented on the details of the case as if their own gut instincts had not picked up what I (and others) had fixated on. And that needs an explanation, imho.
Very early on, it was in the public domain that the accuser specified a condomless 3 orifice rape, the players said none of them had touched her and then sensitive testing confirms that they had not. Also in the public record is that from that moment the DAs office stopped investigating the “crime” in any meaningful way.
Forget details, forget racism, sexism, etc. Forget any reputation the LAX guys may have had or not had. What does ones guts say about these core facts?
To me, this is all like the scene in the movie “Primary Colors” where the Clinton character is caught switching the DNA taken from a child for testing he was accused of fathering. It did not prove he was the father but it absolutely proved that he thought he might be. I regard this sort of clue as being about a million times more valid than a mountain of posturing and lawyer-talk. The Lax case produced a plethora of high grade clues of this quality right from the beginning yet so many chose to ignore them and seize on details, distractions, and what-ifs. Why? Why was it so hard for smart people to seperate obvious wheat from chaff?
You can find fault with Johnsons methods if held to the standards of Academia? OK, go for it. After this fight turned out the way it did, do you expect me or any other hooligans to stop trusting our guts and start caring more about whether Academic standards are upheld in a public knife fight? Good luck on that one.
I’m not criticizing Johnson in this post for failing to uphold any special academic standards, though I am saying that based on DIW he’s a miserable excuse for a history professor. If a physics professor gave you a long lecture about how pigs can fly, you might well respond “You’re a physics professor???” but that doesn’t mean you’d be criticizing him for failing to live up to academic standards. It’s my opinion that the bar Johnson fails to clear is that of the educated man on the street, or that of a competent journalist. But what do I know? Maybe all forms of honest, rational analysis have been relegated to uptight eggheads.
I don’t, in any case, expect to convince “hooligans” of anything. If that was a goal I’d have had to write a very different blog.
“The criminal investigation produced its own
quintessential sort of evidence, but most of us–
and as far as I can tell that includes Johnson–
still got it second-hand, as news or some other
kind of write-up. I don’t see any big problems
with his treatment of the criminal evidence,
though I haven’t really looked.”- Zimmerman.
Curious. Why would we not expect piles
of bullshit with Johnson’s “treatment of
the criminal evidence” also? Yes the devil
is in the details. Take a look sometime
and see what evidence Johnson assiduously
omits, while fabricating his bullshit wonderland.
I don’t trust a thing he writes about the case, but I do want to be clear about what I’ve looked at carefully enough to have an informed opinion. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if there’s a lot of fudging in his coverage of the criminal side, and doing it by omission would be right up his alley. Digging into that will have to be a project for someone else, though.
(This doesn’t mean that I think there might have been a rape—see my note a few comments down)
Speaking of scholarly vendettas, KC has a new post critical of Barbara Barnett who seems to be an automatic member of that un-scholarly club mainly because she “earned her M.A. degree from Duke’s Group of 88-topheavy English Department”. I am unable to find the article in full so I can’t comment on the merits of it from a scholarly standpoint. However, I do find it amusing that KC is very critical of the article’s main complaint about how Duke ‘framed’ the Lacrosse case. It seems Barnett is upset that Duke failed to frame this case in way that opened up a discussion of the issues of rape and sexual assault on campus. This from a man who framed the case in a way that opened up a condemnation of all of those academic, left-wing, femi-nazi, elite white male hating moon-bats out to take over the very essence of our nation’s universities and eventually all the way up to very top echelon of our nation’s government, the Chairman and CEO of Exxon-Mobil.
I couldn’t help but notice a comment from Debrah on the August events topic that celebrates your much anticipated end to these merciless attack on poor old KC.
The essense of tribalism is to trash the other side for doing exactly what you’re doing while you trash them. The mud-slinging about Sarah Palin is playing that out in a big way. In fact, Johnson would be a natural to join the other jabberers and take up arms against the hypocrisy and sexism that’s raining down on poor Palin’s head.
Barnett’s piece may in fact be ridiculous and indefensible—Johnson loves an easy target. But I didn’t get very far into his post about it. He starts the second paragraph by calling Barnett a “true believer.” That’s like reading his thoughts about left-wing “groupthink”—good for a laugh. That was enough for me—I’ve read enough of his hatchet jobs for the time being.
I saw the comment from Debrah, too. Charming, as always, and she’s clever about slipping in musical references—she left a note here, too, that ends with a line about playing the flute with my sphincter muscle. The rhetoric from over yonder in Wonderland gets more and more pathetic as the horizons there shrink from narrow to microscopic.
You mentioned “honest, rational analysis”. In my opinion, anyone (who was paying attention) who did not come out 4 square on the side of the Lax guys innocence by the Middle of May 2006 has no claim, at all, of being rational or analytical, or - in many cases - honest about this case.
How could anyone who failed to sort out - or acknowledge - what was happening in plain sight in real time find the hubris to critique the analytical skills of those who did? Oh, now I remember where they could find more than enough hubris to sustain that sort of madness. And people wonder why no one at Duke got around to apologizing.
You don’t know what I was doing in 2006, and you can’t point to anything specific that I’ve gotten wrong in my post(s), but how dare I? Give me a break.
Mr. TP Squirrel must have been in a coma the last two years. What about the criminal case needs to be omitted when the Lax guys were innocent? It was never the Defense Attorneys who were trying to hide information and stifle investigation, it was only the DA and his cronies who did that. Likewise, when the State Att. Generals office took over the case, the defense lawyers voluntarily opened their case files - and the Lax guys were declared innocent. Nifong was forced to open his case files and then he was disbarred and sent to jail on the basis of what was found there.
I don’t know what TP Squirrel had in mind with respect to Johnson’s treatment of the criminal evidence. As far as I’m concerned, though, there was no sexual assault at the lacrosse party, and when I said that I don’t trust anything Johnson writes that doesn’t mean that I doubt the bottom-line conclusion. It’s not one that depends on Johnson’s analysis—the state Attorney General and Joe Neff got there independently, and James Coleman and many others have endorsed the consensus opinion. It’s to Johnson’s credit that he was an early and uncompromising proponent of the lacrosse players’ innocence, but he wrote a lot more about the criminal aspects than he had to in order to simply establish that innocence—there was much more to his agenda. In his characterizations of the people involved on both sides and in other details there’s still room for him to bullshit. Whether he did or not, I can’t say, but I take everything he writes with a huge grain of salt unless it’s corroborated by a source I trust.
The flamboyantly predictable Debrah picked up a caustic response I made to a ridiculous comment of hers. I never cleared her comment, but I did leave it in the moderation queue for a while with my venting appended—the lack of basic editing is pretty obvious. So naturally it’s been posted on DIW now. I guess on those terms they’re welcome to it. Someone over there might even prove me wrong.
It doesn’t look good so far, though. Johnson has truly hit on the formula for being critically invincible—insulate yourself rigorously from hearing or understanding anything that might be a challenge. So, he finds it “fascinating to see [Zimmerman’s] assumption that I’m somehow sympathetic to Palin; despite his alleged extensive reading of the blog, he seems unaware that I’m supporting Obama.” I’d be at least a little fascinated that he could imagine that I’ve missed all his pro-Obama stuff, but I’ve seen the playing-dumb response before. I love the bit about my “alleged extensive reading,” though—as if it’s beyond his power to figure out how extensively or carefully I’ve read his blog. It is true, as far as I can tell, that he’s careful not to read my posts—that seems to be what Debrah is for.
It’s also true that my crack about him joining the affronted defenders of Sarah Palin was half-baked. So, fwiw, here’s what I had in mind. Her nomination has, it seems to me, unleashed a tidal wave of mindless tribalism (see below), and that’s something Johnson has a real talent for, especially for covering it with a veneer of rationality. There’s no question both sides are doing it, but when it comes to racism, sexism, and the like, he’s most at home with the moralistic reactionaries.
I don’t doubt that his support for Obama is genuine, even though it strikes me as ironic. That support is completely irrelevant when it comes to judging DIW, but that doesn’t stop Johnson from conspicuously flashing the pro-Obama badge every so often, as if it excuses his rhetorical thuggery.
As to the mindless tribalism, here’s a priceless bit from Jon Stewart:
88 Bozo’s conspiring with a corrupt Durham poltical system aided and abetted by the Duke administration trying to put innocent kids in jail is the problem. Not you academic reharmonized cluelessness.
This is nothing but spin and “reharmonized bull shit”. You must be one of the famous 88 or a close relative.
That’ll teach me to mess with the Wonderland crowd, huh?
It is difficult to counter KC’s attack on Barbara Barnett’s scholarship without reading the full article. It certainly makes it easy for KC to cherry pick things that he does not agree with. However I can say that Barbara Barnett did receive an award August 11 at the National Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communications meeting in Washington DC. It was the Mary Ann Yodelis Smith Award for Feminist Scholarship.
I wonder if this is the same Barbara Barnett that is shown in this link: http://userpages.umbc.edu/~korenman/wmst/rape_teachabt.html
Interesting discussion 12 years ago with some well know participants. It is not fair, in my opinion, to label Barbara Barnett in such a way that KC has based on on snippets from one article. Just my two cents.
Didn’t Kristen Butler recently earn an English degree from that same Duke “Group of 88-topheavy English department”? That is not to say that makes her articles less scholarly, I think she is a talented writer and also deserving of the awards she received. However, she is capable of being way off base as in the case of her “Loony” column. It just seems to me to be a double standard applied to supporters of the Lacrosse players and others perceived as not being a part of that group.
Yes, it seems that she was an english major.
So you just couldn’t resist and responded to Debra. One part of your comment really stands out to me:
And I see he’s crushed another fearsome enemy in the latest post. Bully that he is, he never picks a fight unless the odds are wildly in his favor.
I’m curious as to whether this applies to Chaffe, Mark Anthony Neal and Davidson or some of the lesser lights among the G88 like Cathy Curtis and Grant Farred who you haven’t covered in your blog?
You seem satisfied that you’ve constructed an air tight case against Johnson but I’m not convinced. In course of twenty five or so posts in nearly a year you really have presented very little. When I glance at your previous post I think half the points are arguable. Given the size of DIW’s archives it’s a paltry list of transgressions.
I look forward to your wrap up post and would ask you to consider this question. Do you think your rhetoric and tactics have come to resemble Johnson’s or not?
The comment about when he picks a fight doesn’t hold water. But when he writes about quotes or articles or “scholarship” from the other side it’s typically not so much criticism as demolition. The DIW commentariat (the current remnants, especially) routinely takes this as evidence that all those liberal/leftist/feminist/etc. professors are idiots who can’t think their way out of a paper bag. As far as I can tell what’s behind these demolitions isn’t brilliant criticism, it’s a selective and manipulative approach to the text he’s attacking. So what I had in mind was his habit of destroying a facade instead of a real opponent.
I’m sure that many points I’ve made are arguable. It would be nice to get some real argument—argument that’s aimed at the things I’ve actually written and that’s open to a more complex and ambiguous sense of the people involved. Without that kind of criticism I’d be foolish to to think I’d made any kind of airtight case. But when you say that I’ve presented very little, and say that I seem to think I made an airtight case but don’t say what I seem to think I’ve proved, what I suspect is that I haven’t been writing about the things that you think are important.
I’ve thought quite a bit about whether and to what extent I’m engaging in the rhetoric and tactics that I’m criticizing. I’ve tried not to. It will take someone else, or some distance, to say how well I’ve done. The commonality that bothers me the most is that we’re both writing about people whose are drastically and inexcusably wrong in some fundamental way. That’s not a very good basis for insightful criticism.
I do not have a problem with accepting the complexity of the personalities of those who made wrong guesses about how this case was going to turn out. I would certainly not want my entire personality and character to be judged in public and for all time on the basis of one wrong call I might make, especially when the situation is one that is confused and often changing..
But a big part of what has made this particular saga so strange and compelling to a guy like me is the fact that so many obviously smart people seemed so resistant to facing the simple truth that Mangum was a severely adled drug person who made shit up more or less on a daily basis and that no one at the party even touched her inappropriately. That simple, sturdy fact was sitting there in plain sight for MONTHS while many, many in Academia talked and wrote as if the kids might have been guilty of serious crimes. Why did they do that? That is the interesting question, to me anyway. That they might not always act so badly is inherently not so interesting, partly because it is already assumed to be the case and partly normal decent behavior does not stand out.
The fact that they did enter the fray and produced a lot of well documented nonsense is the reason there is a story here. K. C. Johnson did not invent that part or even seriously overstate it. . One might say that his main goal has been to explore what other supremely stupid and wrong opinions these same people might have produced and to wonder aloud they came to such a sorry end.
I suppose I am trying to say that the big facts in the foreground of this story leave you with little to work with in defending the enablers and scouring KC Johnson. The enablers created the damage to their reputations, not KC. They were the ones who made so many loud and destructive and absolutely wrong comments about this matter. You seem to be saying that KC should have put more effort into showing the decent side of their careers. For the sake of balance and right perspective, I suppose. But who is to say where a right balance lies when the story line - largely created by the hoax enabler/cheerleaders long ago drifted over the line into never-never land? Like the standards of discourse that prevail in a peer reviewed Academic journal have much relevance when the opening salvo comes in the form for example of some of their own Professors demanding the case move forward and the team be punished on the basis of NOTHING more than flimsy rumors
To critique what you’ve actually written would take time and effort. What a ridiculous request.
I read your posts and frequently see things I could counter with valid critiques. Not in the sense I could destroy the argument but I could pick at the edges or force you to admit the tone or emphasis is over the top. I don’t for two reasons. One is that a point by point discussion of why I think Karla Holloway’s Bodies of Evidence or Cathy Davidson’s op-ed were bs from start to finish would require a long detour down a path that would take you away from your central project which is analyzing what Johnson has written. The other reason is I keep waiting for some one else to do it (otherwise known as pure laziness).
The lack of intelligent comments or critiques has fascinated me. I would guestimate that 90% of the comments you receive are contra your positions and fully 80% of those do more to help your case than undermine it. The remaining 10% (such as the Barbra Barnett comment) don’t really help you.
I can only speculate on the reasons for paucity of sharp commentary. On the liberal side I think they have already made the critiques on KC that they think are valid, the remaining fish are too small to bother frying and they don’t want to do anything to support the Duke faculty. On KC’s side I think that most of the intelligent people have moved on and the remaining ones attach a cloak of infallibility to KC. I see KC as some one who was nearly completely right but made a few mistakes. Engaging your posts intelligently would require some concessions and I don’t think most of KC’s supporters are willing to to that.
I read the blog for analysis of the rhetoric. How did KC construct the argument and how do you attack it. I think you are holding KC to an extremely stringent standard and glossing over what the objects of his scorn have done. It doesn’t all boil down to two wrongs make a right or yea but look what they said arguments. In the Baldwin exchange you linked to Weigman’s letter, printed the text of Haynie’s email and then asked the question “is there a hint of political correctness in Haynie’s email?”. The answer is no but there sure was in Weigman’s letter. You also need to follow a link to find out that Baldwin later apologized for only the language of his comment. Do you think he might have been pressured to do that? The way you presented the exchange made it easy to undermine Johnson’s argument. The key to me was Baldwin apologizing for language that wasn’t racist at all. The Devil is in the details.
It should be pretty obvious to anyone who’s paying attention that I’m fascinated by language and by the way arguments are made and understood, and with those interests in mind, DIW is a remarkable specimen. It’s also obvious that it hits a nerve, and there’s no question that limits my objectivity. Some months ago I went out trolling for feedback, and what I found is that people were, first of all, pretty settled in their opinions, and also tired of the long, bitter, and abrasive debate. Just scrolling through those comment threads on Acephalous is exhausting (the links are in my post). So one way to look at it is that I was about 6 months late to get much response from others critical of Johnson.
The Baldwin thing is definitely arguable in the way you suggest. My fundamental objection, though, is that Johnson didn’t look any deeper than he had to in order to tell the story he wanted to tell, and the story is essentially prefabricated, at that. Or else he did find out more but withheld it because it didn’t fit the story. I don’t think it’s too much to expect him to live up to basic journalistic standards, especially if he’s using other people’s email for evidence. In some ways I may have weakened that point by editorializing about how I saw the episode. But if I’d avoided that kind of editorializing I think I would have risked doing one of the things that bothers me most about DIW. Johnson’s approach to criticism is to inflict maximum damage with minimum risk, and when it comes to constructive criticism, DIW is exceptionally thin.
In your posting, you implied that Johnsons referrence to the amount of media coverage of various events in Durham meant that he got his information about such things by watching a lot of TV, something the Gang of 88 were too busy to indulge in.
There is something called Nexis/Lexis that facilitates near instant online review of the history of everything sent out by the broadcast media. KC has always mentioned his reliance on this resource. Indeed, all of the computer literate folks I know simply assume that any concrete assertion about media coverage come from there. It is so easy and thorough.
So, the interesting question is and remains - why are you bothering to do this? - if you know that we know better than what are asserting.
Nifong did that a lot. His attitude must have been, “I am powerful and you aren’t. So there!!!” Since the material in the lawsuits have been out, Duke Administration has been doing the same thing, although presumably under the advice of consel.
First of all, the news doesn’t become something simple and unproblematic because you look it up on Lexis/Nexis. And no, I don’t think and didn’t imply that Johnson “got his information … by watching a lot of TV.” I did refer to two situations in which he specifically cited TV news stories but used them in a way that’s sloppy or naive or self-serving or some combination of those things. With respect to the “Castrate” banner, Lexis/Nexis was revealing, but not in a way Johnson could bring himself to acknowledge.
Prof. Barnett sent me a copy of the paper, and, in fact, it was the Word copy that she sent to the journal. She and I have had a pleasant back-and-forth and she strikes me as being sincere and probably a pretty decent person.
Unfortunately, the paper pretty much is boiler plate modern feminism, complete with all of the requisite cliches and the like. Even though I personally like Prof. Barnett, I cannot say, academically speaking, that it is a “good paper.” (But, I have published a few bad ones in academic journals myself.)
The problem as I see it is that Prof. Barnett really does not go into the guts of the case. She assumes that for nine months, the possibility that Reade, Collin, and David really had raped Crystal Mangum was real, but that in the late hour, additional information was found that negated the charges.
Thus, she reasons, Duke should have engaged in all of the usual “sexual abuse” programs that people like Prof. Barnett believes should be in place. She never really seems to understand what actually happened, or why the charges were filed in the first place. Instead, she assumes that the legal system was working just fine, but the cops and prosecutors simply made a mistake. It never occurs to her that this was a frame from almost the beginning.
Part of the problem, as I see it, is that K.C. Johnson just does not see this kind of “scholarship” as legitimate. He is from an older school of academe, in which one does not wear one’s ideology on one’s sleeve for academic publications. It is not that ideology disappears, but rather that one needs to try to keep some objectivity in the process.
An interesting and thoughtful reaction. I can’t respond to the reading of Barnett’s paper because I haven’t read it myself. For me, the question of whether it’s a good analysis is a lot more important than the question of whether it belongs in an academic journal. I don’t dismiss any of these impressions, and I’m quite sympathetic to the idea that ideology should not be the driver when writing for academic publications.
I appreciate your thoughts on this as well, Mr. Anderson. I have not seen the article in full either nor have I read KC’s academic articles to see if he does a better job keeping his ideology in check. One comment of yours that I would like to ask you about:
Have you considered that this view might actually have been the majority view at the time from the general public? Even among those that followed this case on a daily basis many were not convinced until after the December 15th hearing. Just something to consider and it would certainly put her ideas about the framing of the case from a PR standpoint in perspective. I don’t believe Duke’s efforts in this area were intended for the likes of TalkLeft and LieStoppers membership.
I re-read your earlier comments about Lexis/Nexis and admit that I got it wrong. You were not asserting the KC got his information from watching a lot of TV. And so I should not have drawn conclusions from the notion that you did.
Be all that as it may, your critique regarding Johnsons treatment of the “castrate” banner is still no more than a complaint that he treated it later on as a bigger event than anyone saw it to be at the time. That is pretty thin stuff, imho because the sign did exist and it was produced by Duke people and Duke never repudiated it. How much seriousness that should be attached to it can be debated; it is not so measurable a matter.
But this I think it a pretty servicable example of the thinness of your whole project here—of attacking KC. On KCs side are being absolutely right about the issues of guilt/innocence, whether or not the 88 signatories were wise to act, the failure of Duke to follow and enforce its own guidelines, and so on. Against him is the fact that he used rhetorical shortcuts while engaged in a high profile, almost single-handed debate/PR battle with among others the mainstream media—who of course never use tricks of any kind.
I am sorry. I just do not see a lot of juice in it and I wonder if you really do either.
Mr. Red Mountain mentioned the Dec 15 hearing as the point when many in Durham began to change their minds. You know, the main outcome of that hearing was that it became obvious that Nifong was going to be eviserated by the NC bar. He screwed up too badly in actually getting CAUGHT hiding exculpatory DNA evidence. The frame was over at that point and everybody sensed it - and wanted to run clear of the A bomb coming down that now had Nifongs name on it.
But was that the first time he obviously lied? Er, no. It wasn’t. But maybe Durhamites are more inclined to give their new local hero the benefit of the doubt because the psychic cost of admitting to being so wrong about him and his biggest case was prohibitive.
As far as I can tell nobody who’s taken the trouble to know what they’re talking about claims that the banner was “produced by Duke people.” Some people accociated with Duke were involved in the protest, but the potbanger’s didn’t emanate from Duke or represent it. In general their attitude towards the university seems to have been suspicious if not hostile. There’s an good article on Liestoppers about all that—I referred to it when I first wrote about them (at the time I also said my piece about the need to repudiate the banner). Johnson draws on it too:
He was also working from a collection of intra-potbanger email messages. I can’t imagine that he would have kept it to himself if that correspondence implicated a lot of Duke people or the institution.
Johnson didn’t mention the banner until Jan. 07, and then he took it up with all the integrity of a witch hunter, so the issue is not “rhetorical shortcuts.” And I’m pretty sure the defense of Truth was no longer his sole burden by that time.
An interesting and thoughtful reaction. I can’t respond to the reading of Barnett’s paper because I haven’t read it myself. For me, the question of whether it’s a good analysis is a lot more important than the question of whether it belongs in an academic journal. I don’t dismiss any of these impressions, and I’m quite sympathetic to the idea that ideology should not be the driver when writing for academic publications.
It really depends upon the journal. Those that are from the “Identity Studies” area tend to be more ideological, although ideology tends to permeate all professions. I have seen good papers rejected from economic journals because the content of the paper was contrary to the known ideology of the editor.
By the way, even the hard science journals have gone this way. Part of the problem is that much of modern science is government-funded, and the political process is likely to be a part of the subject of the funding.
And, let us be honest, a lot of academic publications are not exactly academically rigorous, including some that have published my papers!