Me: There is no reference to the behavior of the lacrosse players in the section you quoted.

KC: I am pleased to see that you are no longer denying that Matherly’s post referenced the lacrosse players’ behavior.

[Update below]

There’s the essence of my latest exchange with KC Johnson in the Durham-in-Wonderland comments — as you can see, the man hasn’t lost any of his ponderous, insincere charm. Not much has been going on there for quite a few months, but every now and then Johnson drops in with his rhetorical blunderbuss. The latest this past weekend was about the trial of Crystal Mangum, and near the end I found this:

In a recent post, [Steven Matherly] has taken a break from defending Mangum, and instead has launched into the character attacks on the lacrosse players that were so common from figures like Cathy Davidson and her Group of 88 comrades. Matherly made the mindboggling claim that the role of the lacrosse players in the lacrosse case is comparable to “the racist riots of the 1920s and 30s.”

At the other end of the link, there’s an earnest piece that’s framed as a plea for folks to stop hurling crude racist rhetoric at Mangum — “in your heart of hearts”, Matherly writes, “you know that it is wrong to attack her personally.” In the middle of the post he goes over America’s “long and sordid history of race relations” and concludes that if people had used “the N word” and carried out an actual lynching, the lacrosse case would have been just like “the racist riots of the 1920’s and 30’s” — “[e]verything else is the same.” By “everything” what he really means is everything that’s on his mind at the moment, and that’s really just one thing — the way Mangum has been treated.

There’s plenty to argue with in there — vagueness, narrow perspective, facile history — but there is no claim about “the role of the lacrosse players” and no explicit or veiled attack on their character. And it’s not that Johnson cooked up a questionable interpretation of an obtuse text. What he’s offering is a blatant misreading. It’s just plain wrong, and I couldn’t resist telling him so. I thought it would be fun to see if I’d get the usual discredit-the-messenger reaction even when there was so little at stake, not to mention a much smaller audience. The deeper question is whether, in Johnson’s book, someone like Matherly — an insignificant and wrong-headed but useful Wonderland character — deserves to be read accurately and criticized for claims he’s actually made.

The whole exchange is at the end of this post. I started by suggesting that Matherly wasn’t writing about any “role of the lacrosse players” but about the general public, and that the point of his historical comparison was that Mangum had been lynched in the court of public opinion. He responded:

• “It’s always nice to see Prof. Zimmerman straining to defend the Duke and Durham status quo.”

  Why, I appreciate the gracious introduction! It’s too much, really, when I’ve just got one lil’ ol’ correction. But Prof. Johnson is always so helpful to his readers, even the ones with the smallest minds.

• “Matherly’s post, of course, is linked. In the section from which I quoted, Matherly specifically referenced the behavior of the lacrosse players.”

  Well, if it’s linked, everything must be above board.

• “That followed up on other posts by Matherly in which he bizarrely claimed…”

  But wait, what about this post!? You know, the one with the reference? I guess we can get back to that, because it’s interesting how these guys in the “Durham professional left” can’t seem to tell the difference between the Attorney General and a defense attorney. Kind of funny, but sad. Hey, that reminds me of something. Remember the time Prof. Johnson confused a defense brief with a judge’s ruling? That was kind of funny, too.

Johnson goes on at length to point out the obvious: Matherly will never be able to cite an incident from the South during the 20s or 30s with anything like the peculiar features of the lacrosse case. Actually Johnson isn’t completely sure about that, he’s “unaware” (my emphasis, of course) — “unaware of any racially charged event” from that place and time “in which the local prosecutor had violated myriad ethical guidelines to prop up a case filed by a local African-American woman who made wild criminal allegations against white men;” and he’s also “unaware” of one “in which significant elements of the local white establishment…”
      Bob Ashley’s Herald-Sun!       Grrrrrrrrroup of 88!
“…bent over backwards to give the benefit of the doubt to an African-American woman who made wild criminal allegations against white men.”

So much for history. Anyway, I followed up to contradict the only thing that was on point in all that.

There is no reference to the behavior of the lacrosse players in the section you quoted. If you mean “the N word,” he’s claiming that’s an element that was missing from the lacrosse case. …

There is no attack on the lacrosse players in Matherly’s piece. … You’re saying it’s ok to misrepresent someone as long as you link to the original? Or he’s so contemptible that you can say whatever you want about him?

The answer is short but classic. For background, remember that the lacrosse case “began with one unequivocally racist act: a lacrosse player, as part of a racially charged, post-party argument with Kim Roberts, shouting the n-word” (quoting Johnson’s marginally successful effort to write a thoughtful post about “Race, Racism, and the Case” for Martin Luther King day in 2007).

• “I am pleased to see that you are no longer denying that Matherly’s post referenced the lacrosse players’ behavior.”

  Ha! What he says about me is blatantly false and yet, the sentence is strangely true. I did mention a behavior that a player engaged in. And if I’m “no longer denying” then the lack of a reference must have been my objection all along. It’s a diabolically clever way to finesse the argument and declare victory. I don’t doubt that he truly is “pleased.”

• “I don’t recall stating that Matherly is ‘contemptible,’ as you claim.”

  I totally read this into Johnson’s posts, like from his description of Matherly as the “pro-Mangum People’s Alliance activist” whose blog “gives the party line on the trial from Durham’s extreme left,” which involves “spend[ing] most of his time playing the race card, offering conspiratorial rants about the media’s ‘racism’ in its reporting on Mangum.” And the sarcastic parting shot at Matherly’s “mindboggling claim” about the lacrosse players: “Yes, because as any student of U.S. history knows, in the 1920s and 1930s, local prosecutors throughout the South were… willing to violate myriad ethical procedures in order to imprison innocent white people…,” etc.

  My theory is that, when you consistently treat the things a person says and does with contempt, you probably consider that person contemptible (within the context of your analysis or criticism, that is).

• “I do believe, as the post explains and for reasons my first comment reiterates, that Matherly is historically ignorant. Perhaps you disagree.”

  Yes, I’m sure that if I was a reasonable person I’d want to argue about this instead of the other thing.

I don’t think Johnson has much of an answer, do you? Now he may well be obfuscating to avoid giving me the satisfaction of a straight answer, and I wouldn’t really blame him — the only reason I commented was to put him on the spot. Maybe the conclusion is that an obnoxious “Group apologist” like me deserves to be dismissed. And Johnson might actually be able to justify his claim about Matherly, and I might end up with egg all over my face (good thing he doesn’t read this blog).

It looks to me, though, like Johnson’s presumption here is very much like Glenn Beck’s, when he goes after George Soros or some violent radical socialist vegetarian who once shared a cab with Barack Obama back in ‘92 — some people don’t deserve to be heard accurately. With Beck, mishearing is essential to the project, and to some extent that’s true of Johnson, as well — they make an interesting pair of demagogues, and someday I might even manage to write that up.

And now, since I stuck my nose in this, I guess I better say something about Steven Matherly. According to a recent profile in the News & Observer, he’s “served on the City-County Planning Commission, spoken out against the Southpoint SuperTarget and presided over the progressive Durham People’s Alliance.” In 2004 he made an unsuccessful run for the school board. The year after that he got himself arrested by “refus[ing] to stay in his seat in protest of time limits on citizen speakers” at school board meetings. My impression from the article is that even the progressive activists he’s made common cause with see him as a bit of a loose canon.

The profile of Matherly is a sidebar to a fascinating piece about the Friends of Crystal Mangum (“Friends complicate Mangum case”).

They’ve run off one public defender, been chastised by a new defense attorney and faced a threat of jail time by a judge. But the Friends of Crystal Mangum insist they’re on her side, trying to protect her from a corrupt judicial system that they say aims to punish her for accusing three Duke lacrosse players of rape four years ago.

The tension between the Friends and Mangum’s public defenders reminds me of something I wrote a long time ago about bullshit detectors and how it seems to me that attorneys, if they’re any good, can’t afford to “perfect” their clients the way activists do. Unlike protestors in the first phase of the lacrosse case who claimed that they were supporting Mangum, then an unidentified accuser, the Friends are at least in contact with her, so they have a better claim to be acting in her best interests. But taking a case that centers on a domestic dispute and involves three children and putting it in a frame that “screams white power, black oppression” strikes me as misguided at best. And Mangum’s Friends are an offshoot of the Committee on Justice for Mike Nifong — a preposterous cause, as far as I’m concerned.

So, there’s all that, and then there’s the innocuous post I’ve been writing about. Even its broad claim about the root cause of all the ugliness — “if [Mangum] were white she wouldn’t have suffered nearly the abuse that she’s gotten simply because she’s black” — is hardly extreme.

I don’t think there’s enough history in there to say that Matherly is “historically ignorant,” as Johnson claims, or to say that he isn’t. What strikes me is the skewed perspective on history but even more on the present. Matherly writes that he can understand how people would lash out at Mangum if they’re “in some way related to those Lacrosse guys” or they were “harmed in the whole Lacrosse debacle – the Lacrosse coach for example.”

But what I don’t get is the rabid, frothing-at-the-mouth, demonizing of Crystal by nearly the entire white population of Durham, North Carolina, and the entire country.

Hey, why stop with the entire country? There’s a lot of white folks up in Canada, you know.

Rationally, I hope it’s clear that the whole universe of rabid comments about Mangum that Matherly might encounter represents a tiny, biased sample of the white population of Durham and an infinitesimal fraction of the whole country. And some pretty rabid comments have been made about the lacrosse players, too. That’s already a slice out of the population that’s inclined to hurl racial slurs at Mangum (though I suppose there might be a few equal opportunity rhetorical dirtbags out there).

The other day I was sitting in a library thinking about this and as I looked around, I imagined having a little mind reading device that I could point here and there and it would read off the worst thing each person had ever said about Crystal Mangum. Might as well also read out what they said about those Duke lacrosse players, since there once was a time when everyone was badmouthing them. I thought about going to the mall with it, or the airport, or walking around different neighborhoods. I’m sure it’d come back with some shocking stuff, but my guess is that in a lot of places I’d come away with a whole lot of nothing. It’s an interesting thought experiment — give it a try.

But what about that “character attack[]” against the lacrosse players? It’s supposed to be at the end of the section that starts this way:

Let’s assume, for the sake of argument that Crystal is guilty of falsely accusing those Lacrosse guys. Let’s even say that she did it because she has some form of mental illness. Let’s even say she’s manipulating the legal system to some nefarious end and plans to make a fortune off her story.

I submit that the exact same actions by a white woman would not elicit such scorn and attacks as have been visited upon her to date.

What follows is a few paragraphs about the U.S. and its “long and sordid history of race relations.” It’s when he draws his historical conclusion that Matherly brings in the lacrosse case and refers to “the racist riots of the 1920’s and 30’s” — the phrase Johnson quotes — so that’s where we should find the nastiness about the players.

I do not paint with a broad brush. The two things lacking from the whole Duke Lacrosse Case that distinguishes it from the racist riots of the 1920’s and 30’s is the use of the N word (that would have provoked a backlash that would have quickly gotten out of hand) and an actual lynching (folks had to be satisfied with doing it in the press and now in court). Everything else is the same. She’s so ghetto. She’s a whore. She’s a waste of a human soul and much, much worse. You know what I’m talking about. You’ve read what people say about her. Many of you wrote those things yourselves. You’ve said those things to your friends and shook your head as to why the “black community” can’t seem to get itself together.

I suppose that based on a very quick and dirty reading, you might think that when Matherly mentions “the N word,” he’s calling up the one shouted by a lacrosse player at the party. And you might imagine that the uproar following the party was kind of like a riot, and then conclude that Matherly is making “the mindboggling claim that the role of the lacrosse players in the lacrosse case is comparable to ‘the racist riots of the 1920s and 30s.’” If you did, you’d be wrong, because Matherly identifies the epithet as something that was “lacking from” the lacrosse case. It’s kind of a strange thing to say, since that foul-mouthed confrontation at the party is a big moment in most any narrative of the case. But that’s what he wrote.

My sense is that Johnson’s interpretation is driven as much by his assumptions about the author as by the text itself. Let’s say that an ordinary (e.g., not activist) student claims in a paper that a major difference between a recent incident and similar incidents in the past was that this time protestors hadn’t run around screaming that cops are pigs. Johnson happens to know that a guy named John had notoriously called the cop who arrested him a pig, and he’s confident that the student knows it, too. I doubt that Johnson would accuse the student of assaulting John’s character.

Not only did Matherly bring up the epithet as something that was absent from the lacrosse case, he also makes it quite clear that he’s writing about what happened to Mangum after she made the rape accusation. What he doesn’t ever make clear is who he’s holding responsible for all that abuse. The passage quoted above seems to target the general public and the press, but maybe it’s just “folks,” or maybe it’s “the entire white population of Durham,” or “you.” This thoroughgoing vagueness is a major shortcoming. It’s also an excellent reason to doubt that Matherly is singling out the lacrosse players. Matherly isn’t singling anyone out. He’s completely indiscriminate.

With his narrow polemical focus, Johnson doesn’t notice enough of Matherly’s text to come away with any insight. All he gets from it is a flimsy pretext to rhetorically revictimize the figures that keep his project limping resentfully along. Matherly’s writing is far less polemical. What the two share is an impressive devotion to their chosen victim(s).

UPDATE (Dec. 20): I get a paragraph in Johnson’s new post wrapping up the Mangum trial. He still can’t bring himself to articulate what “role of the lacrosse players” Matherly referred to. I suspect that he can’t articulate what, exactly, I did that was Amelia Bedelia-like, either (“Why on earth would those lacrosse players go to Jim Crow to get some rolls?” Amelia shrieked). As for passive-aggressive, he picks that up from a commenter who, like Johnson, likes to think that he sees through me.

Johnson links to the comments I left over there but not to this post — I assume he was unaware of it, since Debrah isn’t around to keep tabs on me. I left a short comment with a link, for anyone interested in my actual opinion. In addition to the usual bullshit about my “long-hinted-at secret evidence,” he came back with this:

I did—and I just doublechecked this—link to his comments in my original post, but just in case, I’m going to link to it again here.

Making a show of doing something that’s completely redundant and nobody asked for, in response to something he imagines to be criticism — that, ladies and gentlemen, is passive-aggressive.

Here’s the whole exchange between me and Johnson.

Me, 12/12/10 3:26 AM (jump back ^):

No, Matherly is not writing about the “role of the lacrosse players,” as you claim, he’s writing about the role of the general public, or in his words, “the rabid, frothing-at-the-mouth, demonizing of Crystal by nearly the entire white population of Durham, North Carolina, and the entire country.”

He starts, in fact, by assuming “for the sake of argument that Crystal is guilty of falsely accusing those Lacrosse guys” and proceeds to explain why “the exact same actions by a white woman would not elicit such scorn and attacks as have been visited upon her.” I take the comparison that you single out as suggesting that she was lynched in the court of public opinion.

Did you see the part where he wrote “I know that I will be misquoted and misunderstood for saying all this” and decide it was your job to make an honest man out of him? Or is he just not an easy enough target for you?

KC Johnson, 12/12/10 9:53 AM (jump back ^):

It’s always nice to see Prof. Zimmerman straining to defend the Duke and Durham status quo.

Matherly’s post, of course, is linked. In the section from which I quoted, Matherly specifically referenced the behavior of the lacrosse players. That followed up on other posts by Matherly in which he bizarrely claimed that word of the lacrosse players’ innocence had come only from their defense attorneys (the Durham professional left appears to believe that the state Att’y General is actually a criminal defense attorney).

As to Matherly’s argument being that Ms. Mangum was “lynched” in the court of public opinion rather than—as he said—the situation was comparable to “the racist riots of the 1920s and 1930s”:

As I pointed out in the post, I’m unaware of any racially charged event, anywhere in the South, in the 1920s and 1930s in which the local prosecutor had violated myriad ethical guidelines to prop up a case filed by a local African-American woman who made wild criminal allegations against white men; nor am I aware any racially charged event, anywhere in the South, in the 1920s and 1930s in which significant elements of the local white establishment—such as, in this case, Bob Ashley’s Herald-Sun and many members of the Group of 88—bent over backwards to give the benefit of the doubt to an African-American woman who made wild criminal allegations against white men.

Perhaps in future posts, Matherly will highlight these apparently lost-to-history events from the 1920s and 1930s South as he elaborates on his historical analogy.

Me, 12/12/10 11:11 AM (one typo fixed and one missing word filled in) (jump back ^):

There is no reference to the behavior of the lacrosse players in the section you quoted. If you mean “the N word,” he’s claiming that’s an element that was missing from the lacrosse case. Meaning, I guess, that the word wasn’t thrown around in public and the press.

There is no attack on the lacrosse players in Matherly’s piece. It’s a very simple point and has nothing to do with how good or valid or insightful his argument is. You’re saying it’s ok to misrepresent someone as long as you link to the original? Or he’s so contemptible that you can say whatever you want about him?

KC Johnson, 12/13/10 9:50 AM (jump back ^):

To Prof. Zimmerman:

I am pleased to see that you are no longer denying that Matherly’s post referenced the lacrosse players’ behavior. I don’t recall stating that Matherly is “contemptible,” as you claim. I do believe, as the post explains and for reasons my first comment reiterates, that Matherly is historically ignorant. Perhaps you disagree.

Above: Dave Evans, Collin Finnerty, and Reade Seligmann
Below: Cameron Todd Willingham

In the year-old editorial I was writing about last time, Duke Law professor Jim Coleman argues that the aborted cases against the Duke lacrosse players and Alaska Senator Ted Stevens were not failures of the justice system. In those two instances, “some parts of the system failed [but], in the end, justice was done through the system itself.” The real failures, according to Coleman, are the sort that come into the Duke Innocence Project, which he supervises. The students who work on them “are surprised at how little evidence it took to convict the prisoner. And students are dismayed by the widespread indifference of the police, prosecutors, judges, defense lawyers, the North Carolina Attorney General, and the public to the routine misconduct of some prosecutors and police officers and to the possibility that some of these prisoners may be innocent.”

I couldn’t help thinking about Coleman’s editorial when I read David Grann’s article about Cameron Todd Willingham in the New Yorker last September. The state of Texas executed Willingham in 2004. Grann makes a compelling case that he was innocent. If so he represents the ultimate failure of the justice system. Another case discussed in Grann’s article is an uncanny parallel to Willingham’s. What saved Ernest Ray Willis from the lethal injection that Texas had in store for him, too, was a really good attorney with deep pockets. It’s much the same story with Alan Gell, a North Carolina man whose overturned capital murder conviction helped set the legal stage for the lacrosse case.

(This is as good a place as any to let you know that I am a total layman when it comes to the law. If you’re not, don’t hesitate to tell me what I’ve missed or misunderstood. It’s possible that I know even less than I think I know, but at the same time I don’t want to tack “it seems to me” or “as I understand it” or some such thing on every other sentence. So, consider yourself warned).

At the April 2007 press conference for the three lacrosse players who had just been exonerated by the North Carolina Attorney General, defense attorney Jim Cooney’s overall assessment was the same as Coleman’s. He and his colleagues were “delighted the justice system worked,” though he goes on to stress that “it never should have misfired to begin with.” He was functioning as part of the system, and it would have been perverse of him to describe his success as the system’s failure. And in fact it wasn’t the first time he’d been a safety net for the system’s flaws. He was part of the “North Carolina legal dream team” that freed Alan Gell, and so were two other lacrosse-case defense attorneys, Joe Cheshire and his junior partner, Brad Bannon. More recently, Cheshire was instrumental in reversing the conviction of another man who was wrongfully sent to North Carolina’s death row, Jonathan Hoffman.

It was Joe Neff of the News and Observer who wrote about the “legal dream team,” in a fascinating article that quantifies the effort to overturn Gell’s conviction (the article isn’t online, so I’ve put an excerpt at the end of this post). Cooney was working pro bono, and he estimated that he and his staff at Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice had put in 1000 hours, or about $300,000 worth of work. That’s only a fraction of the total effort, though exactly what fraction isn’t clear from the article. Among the things it doesn’t include are Cooney’s hours. By way of comparison, Neff mentions that one of the court-appointed attorneys who defended Gell in his first trial billed for a total of 85 hours in three years. Several other defense attorneys were involved in the first round, but even though the case hinged on the victim’s time of death, they didn’t engage any expert witnesses. I imagine, and certainly hope, that with open discovery in place a smart, conscientious lawyer could put together an adequate defense without burning through half a million dollars — the problems with the state’s case were not exactly subtle. But the enormous effort that’s required to reverse a slipshod prosecution is a sobering measure of the state’s leverage. It’s my impression that the time and money that went into overturning Ernest Ray Willis’s conviction was even more out of proportion to the irresponsible but perfunctory prosecution that put him on death row. (The definitive account of the Gell case is the four-part series that Joe Neff wrote in 2002 — it’s a great read, too. This 2007 interview with Cooney and Bannon is a good source for their perspective on Gell, Duke lacrosse, and open discovery.)

One comment that Cheshire made to Neff takes on extra resonance when you bring the lacrosse case into the picture: “What Mary [Pollard] and Jim [Cooney] and I have tried to do is make sure Alan Gell gets as good a defense as a rich person” (and rich is the right word — a defense like that could bankrupt a person who was merely middle class). Ironically, as Neff points out, “Getting sentenced to death was a lucky break for Alan Gell.” It triggered a mandatory review, which put his case in front of Cooney and Pollard and set the stage for his “dream team” retrial. Since their families were able to pay, Seligmann, Finnerty, and Evans got a robust defense without first landing on death row, or even in jail, and I suspect that’s a consistent difference between a real rich person’s defense and the indigent’s equivalent.

Needless to say, none of the lacrosse-case attorneys at that press conference were talking about the great defense rich people get. They were, I believe, still on the job, which at that stage would have involved working to restore their clients’ reputations and staking a claim to damages. With respect to the players’ reputations, Cheshire took a good-natured jab at the dullards in the media who had been so fixated on guilt: “Well, [NC Attorney General] Roy Cooper said a word today. The word is I-N-N-O-C-E-N-T. And I want to make sure everybody has got that and knows how to spell it.” The other theme was pain and suffering, and I assume that was to some extent strategic. It would, in any case, have been unprofessional for the attorneys to imply that their clients’ wealth mitigated anything.

It was the players who spoke to that point — both Reade Seligmann and Dave Evans acknowledged that they would have been completely at Nifong’s mercy if they had been poor. Seligmann’s comment about how the “entire experience has opened my eyes up to a tragic world of injustice I never knew existed” has been cited quite a few times, including in Coleman’s editorial, and for good reason. Of the three, he was the most energized and outspoken about the big principles — it’s clear he thought long and hard about them (and continues to). When Evans talked about how bad things could have been he was thanking his family for making sure he was well represented. A natural approach given the occasion, and he made a strong statement.

I don’t take lightly the fact that [my parents’] hard work, their success and their sacrifice has allowed me to be represented by such fine lawyers. Many people across this country, across this state, would not have the opportunity that we did. And this could simply have been brushed underneath the rug just as another case and some innocent person would end up in jail for their entire life.

That press conference was an impressive exercise in public relations, and I’m curious about how planned and coordinated it was (there’s nothing disreputable, by the way, about a little intelligent PR on behalf of people who’ve been thrust into the media spotlight and dragged through the mud). The statements from the three young men were the centerpiece, though, and with them what really mattered wasn’t so much the message as the significance it had for speaker. There are three distinct personalities on view, and it seems to me that each of them did, in fact, speak his mind, and to good effect. What they chose to say about the justice system must have been influenced by conversations they had with their attorneys and by things they read or heard elsewhere — two of them thank KC Johnson (except it’s transcribed as “Casey”), so they must’ve been following Durham-in-Wonderland — but it was also a sincere reflection of their experience staring into the belly of the beast. They wanted to put the experience in perspective, and I admire that.

The attorneys spoke with a mixture of affection, relief, and indignation, all of which would come pretty naturally when a long and intense process ends with complete vindication. For the most part a little emphasis and embellishment is all it took to do the work they need to do on behalf of their clients. They’re forthright about what made the case such a debacle but also measured and incisive (Cooney’s take on on the “villains” in the case is especially interesting — I’ve excerpted it below). Acting as MC, Cheshire’s light touch is disarming and he’s the soul of generosity, obviously very much in his element. I do wonder, though, if all the attention he pays to his colleagues doesn’t make the attorneys a bit too conspicuous for the occasion.

It’s at the beginning of Cooney’s remarks, when he tells the story of how he came to take the case, that the lawyerly stuff gets a little out of control. Ads for luxury items tend to suggest they’re the mark of a worthy buyer — a person of taste and discernment, or else someone who’s “earned it.” Cooney’s services end up sounding like that sort of item, except that what makes the client worthy in this case isn’t their taste but their pain.

You know, I always seem to be in trial when something is happening in this case. I was arguing in front of a jury about two-and-a-half hours ago, so I’m in a little bit of a decompression.

But it reminded me that I got involved in this case when I was in the middle of another trial in the fall and Joe Cheshire called me. And I should know better than to take Joe’s calls.

And he called me and said I have a case for you — he had already tried to get me in the case once, by the way. And he told me you will never have a more innocent client than this young man. You have got to take this case.

And, of course, I was in the middle of a trial, I was tired, and I said look, let me get through this trial, I’ll go up and talk to the family. And I spent two days with Kathy and Reade and Phil — sat in their kitchen, talked to them, got to know them. And I cannot tell you the amount of pain that family was in.

The only comparison I can make was to a family who, god forbid, that had a child with a potentially fatal disease. And they woke up every morning not knowing whether their child was going to live and go on with a normal life or be taken from them [forever].

Because make no mistake about that, if Mike Nifong had had his way, Reade Seligmann would have spent 30 years in jail and he never would have seen his parents alive again outside of a prison waiting room.

And, after spending that time with them, I decided that Joe was right, as he usually is, and I needed to be in this case.

It seems to me that the compelling legal reason for someone of Cooney’s caliber to take the case was Nifong’s behavior, which indicated that he would pursue not justice but a conviction, by whatever means necessary. That, at least, is why it was imperative for the young men he’d singled out to have an exceptional attorney, wasn’t it? Cooney suggests some such logic when he raises the specter of Nifong having his way. But the overall impression is that it was the family’s pain and not their objective legal needs that made him decide to represent them.

And then there’s Cheshire’s selling point, which was that Cooney would “never have a more innocent client.” It does seem like that would be a real attraction. As a matter of legal principle, though, does being purely innocent have any bearing on how much a person needs or deserves representation? That’s a serious question — I’m not confident that I know the answer. But I believe that the answer is no, because as I understand it the system is supposed to dispense as much justice to the sort of innocent and the fairly or totally guilty as to the purely innocent.

If lawyering is the romantic occupation of riding in on a white horse to rescue decent, honorable dudes in distress and make their families whole again, Cooney is making the Seligmanns sound like a prime opportunity, for himself. And even back when he made the trip to visit them the odds of success must’ve looked pretty good, though of course there was a very real chance of failure and heartbreak. But at least this was a client who could probably foot the bill. Overall, nice work if you can get it.

No doubt I’ve blown this anecdote way out of proportion, but it disturbs me that a widely respected defense attorney would portray legal representation as if it’s a matter of sentiment and sympathy. I don’t draw any conclusions from Cooney’s story about taking the case — all he says, in the end, is that he spent some time with the Seligmanns and then made up his mind. But leaving the impression that it was the family’s pain that made it impossible to say no is a great way to dramatize how deep and compelling that pain was. And the pain is the point, obviously, but was it really worth the exercise in disengenous storytelling to drive it home? Wouldn’t the unsentimental logic of representation in an adversarial system be the last thing a person like Cooney would fudge? (Again, those are serious questions.)

I was browsing through some of the Durham-in-Wonderland posts about Mike Nifong’s disciplinary hearing in June 2007 and found a rare point of agreement between me and the loyal commenters there — the lacrosse case raised my general opinion of lawyers, too. Here’s a nice clip of Brad Bannon talking about why a defense attorney’s job, in a case like lacrosse, is get things taken care of without their client having to have his day in court.

This is Joe Neff’s article from the News and Observer, Feb. 17, 2004 — “Dream team defends Gell in murder retrial.” It doesn’t seem to be in the paper’s online archive.

At Gell’s first trial, his lawyers hired no expert witnesses to rebut or analyze the state’s case. They never asked a forensic pathologist to determine when Allen Ray Jenkins died.

Time of death is crucial. Prosecutors contend Gell murdered Jenkins on April 3, 1995. But Gell’s new lawyers say Jenkins wasn’t killed until April 8 at the earliest. For that date, Gell has a rock-solid alibi — he was out of state or in jail from April 4 until after Jenkins’ body was found.

Interpreting the clues at the crime scene was essential because the state’s main witness, Crystal Morris, has given widely differing accounts. A crime scene expert could have analyzed blood spatter and the pattern of the shotgun pellets to determine how Jenkins was shot and where the shooter was standing, but none was hired.

For this trial, Gell’s team consulted a parade of experts: a forensic entomologist who studied the maggots at the crime scene to determine the time of death; a forensic anthropologist who studies human decomposition; two engineers to model the temperatures in Jenkins’ house; and a crime scene expert from the Connecticut State Forensic Science Laboratory.

Then Neff gets into the numbers — 1000 hours from Cooney and the Womble Carlyle staff, pro bono, which would normally bill for about $300,000. Cheshire was billing $85/hour, “a fraction of what wealthy clients would pay him,” and it sounds like Cheshire’s firm was absorbing Brad Bannon’s fee. A third of the expert fees were paid by the Office of Indigent Services with Womble Carlyle taking care of the balance. That seems to be in addition to the 1000 hours, and so does this:

According to Hunter’s records, Cooney, Pollard and their investigators spent more than 1,000 hours just winning Gell a new trial. Cheshire and Pollard have not submitted invoices yet for the pretrial preparation, let alone the trial. They will each total hundreds of hours in pretrial work.

By contrast, Chuck Moore of Ahoskie worked on Gell’s case from Gell’s arrest in 1995 through his trial in 1998. According to court records, Moore billed a total of 85 hours on the case before it went to trial.

Here’s what Jim Cooney had to say about what went wrong in Durham and at Duke, from a press conference in April 2007.

I want to talk a little bit about the cowards because, as Joe said, this is a bittersweet day. We’re all delighted the justice system worked. But the reason it’s bittersweet is because it never should have misfired to begin with. And the reason it misfired is because people were afraid to speak truth to power.

And I want to call out first the newspaper in Durham, North Carolina, “The Durham Herald-Sun,” who, to this day…

It seems to me that he was being pretty charitable to describe the people who publicly supported Nifong’s efforts as being afraid to speak truth to power. It wasn’t fear that stopped them, and he makes that clear when he continues (he’d been interrupted by laughter).

… has not written a single editorial critical of the way in which Mike Nifong proceeded. If “The Durham-Herald Sun” had bothered to stand up and demand proper processes, the presumption of innocence, and doing things the way our Constitution provides, do you think Mike Nifong would have rolled forward?

Instead, they published editorials talking about how bad all the lacrosse players were, and that the lacrosse players should have to prove their innocence, and that, in addition to the crimes that night, there was a crime of a cover-up. And you will not see a word of apology from them.

In fact, as recently as two weeks ago, they were still publishing what they knew were lies, and repeating them.

Now, we will never sue them. They have got way too much money. And, as a general proposition in the law, you don’t sue people who buy newsprint by the gallon, because they always win.

But, if they had done what journalists are supposed to do and spoken truth to power, they could have slowed this train down. And there are a number of other people in Durham, some of whom teach for a living, who should have stood up and said, wait a second. Civil rights means something. We have spent careers studying civil rights. We’re not going to throw them down the drain simply because a district attorney tells us to.

One wonders what would have happened if the newspaper had stood up for proper processes and if the teachers had stood up for proper processes, whether that would have slowed the last coward of the case down. And you know who I’m talking about.

The last couple of paragraphs are especially good. Whether resistance from the Herald-Sun and the Duke faculty would have swayed Nifong is an interesting but totally hypothetical question. It could have, for sure. What more important is that it was the right thing to do both personally and, in many cases, professionally.

While I’m at it, the other standout moment (for me) is the bittersweet I-told-you-so that Cheshire laid on the press. I already quoted the end. Here’s the rest:

In that regard, I do want to remind you all of one brief thing. On March the 30th of last year, when the press was completely out of control, when these boys were the guiltiest people on the face of the Earth, when everyone in this country was pillorying them as hooligans and rapists, I called a little press conference in my office and I looked at you national media and you local media and I said — I was kind of scared when I said it — but I said you all are wrong and when this case is over, you’re going to be embarrassed if you don’t open your eyes and listen to what the truth is.

Somebody in the press said to me afterward, we’ve never had anybody speak to us like that. That’s a pretty dangerous thing to say.

Well, Roy Cooper said a word today. The word is I-N-N-O-C-E-N-T. And I want to make sure everybody has got that and knows how to spell it. These young men were, are and always have been innocent.

The analogy isn’t by any means perfect, but it captures my feeling that the lacrosse case invites opinionated people to unleash their irrational, tribalistic reflexes in a self-incriminating way. I’m sure that countless other culture-war touchstones have the same effect and this just happens to be the one I’ve paid the most attention to. The honeypot reaction is purely rhetorical. The primary source of it is the conviction that the situation is all very simple and perfectly one-sided, which means it usually comes from people who are free to reconstruct the setting and the cast of characters solely on the basis of things they’ve read and heard. Some reactions from up close are so reflexive and self-involved that they manage to fit the pattern. Houson Baker’s infamous open letter, for instance, has that tell-tale gush.

Since knee-jerk criticism isn’t exactly hard to come by, it’s especially interesting when people who are clearly capable of doing better fall into the trap. The most sobering example from the Left, for me, is the Tenured Radical, history professor Claire Potter, that is, who, over a year after the incident and in the course of writing about a completely different scandal, took some careless shots at the lacrosse team. Potter is one of the most fair-minded and thoughtful bloggers I know of, so I have to assume that in different circumstances I could easily do the same kind of thing. Looking to the Right, some of the staff at FIRE have outed themselves with overwrought commentary on the case that shows they’re not quite as nonpartisan and dedicated to principle as they claim to be. *

I have a neat little example that I saved up from last spring (a recent post sort of explains why I’m dredging this old stuff up). I probably disagree with this person on most any political question, but when he’s writing on his own blog, at least, he can be thoughtful and generous (compare his reaction to this miscarriage-of-justice story to what follows, for instance). But when he came across a Duke professor writing unapologetically about the lacrosse case, his knee commenced to jerkin’ and he cranked out a remarkably small-minded and uninformed rant. More to the point, a rant that revels in being uninformed and small-minded.

Back in April, a few days after the Attorney General decided to toss out the case against Alaska Senator Ted Stevens, Duke Law professor James Coleman wrote a piece for the Huffington Post. His point was that the justice system stumbled but didn’t ultimately fail in Stevens’ case, and in the lacrosse case as well. Parts of the system failed, but ultimately the failures were corrected. Coleman argues that the true failures are the cases, typically involving indigent or minority defendants, in which the misconduct of prosecutors is met with indifference (disclaimer).

Duke’s Office of News and Communications reposted Coleman’s op-ed a few days after it ran on HuffPost. Over at Protein Wisdom, “The Sanity Inspector” found it too much to bear, so he fired off an irate memo to the “Department of Chutzpah Studies”:

I don’t know that Duke law professor Dr. James E. Coleman Jr. had anything to do with the attempted railroading of the Duke lacrosse players. But anything on the subject of that case that appears under Duke University’s masthead ought to take the form of abject apology for years to come, if common shame were operative. …

… But most defendants don’t have a whole education institution presuming their guilt and baying for their punishment, primarily on the basis of their identity. Most defendants do not become the targets of radical, post-modern, identity politics mongering, class warfare waging inmates of a left-wing loony bin. …

Is Dr. Coleman sorry for what Duke’s faculty did to those players? A quick search of Durham In Wonderland seems to indicate that he was one of the good guys in this case. But he surely could find a better way of publicizing the no doubt good work of the Duke Innocence Project than venturing to claim that the lacrosse players had it easy.

Apparently that quick search of Durham-in-Wonderland (DIW) didn’t turn up this (“Coleman Tears Down the Wall”), or this (“one figure is of towering significance: Jim Coleman”), or this, defense attorney Jim Cooney’s statement at the time his client, Reade Seligmann, was exonerated. First on Cooney’s list of “heroes and cowards” is “the magnificent professor Jim Coleman at Duke University, one of the few professors who was willing to stand up and say, this is not right. We have procedures for a reason. We have presumptions for a reason. What is going on is wrong.” (I’m actually quoting the CNN transcript, which fills in things that KC Johnson, quite understandably, wasn’t able to catch when he was live-blogging.) Why do a lot of searching, anyway, when all you’ll learn is how Coleman handled himself in this case. Who knows, really, how many other cases there are just like it. (Kudos to Wayne for dropping in with a more informed perspective, though).

The Inspector has a good reason to be skeptical, actually. A towering figure is awfully useful if you want to create a landscape of moral midgets, and all of Johnson’s building up of Coleman is of a piece with his knocking down of the so-called “Group of 88.” It’s hard to tell, just skimming the blog, where the analysis leaves off and the self-serving parable begins. Coleman really does stand out in the narrative of the case, though. As Cooney points out, he stuck to the most pressing issues and the core principles behind them. Whether he was addressing the legal situation or campus culture, his efforts were focussed, constructive, and informative, and they made a difference.

The thing is, cranking out opinions online is a pretty self-indulgent occupation — these virtual soapboxes that we’re all climbing on come with very little moral authority, and here’s a fine way to shred it: post a half-baked rant that presumes to judge, on the basis of “common shame,” a man who put his profession reputation on the line in order to help the people whose mistreatment supposedly justifies the rant in the first place. It’s an object lesson in doing vs. spewing:

• Dr. Coleman seems to believe in indiscriminate justice for all, and even if he thought that in the end the justice system wasn’t likely to fail the lacrosse players, he still spoke out forcefully against their prosecutor.

  The Sanity Inspector believes in applying indiscriminate common shame to anyone affiliated with a certain large, politically suspect institution, and he doesn’t mind saying so.

• Dr. Coleman spent hours chairing a committee that, according to KC Johnson, was scrupulously fair and “should have shamed those who blindly accepted the caricatures of the team offered in late March and April 2006.”

  The Sanity Inspector managed to skim DIW for a while before he launched into his rant.

• Dr. Coleman used quotes from the lacrosse players and their families to underscore his point that they were relatively well equipped to deal with the faults of the justice system.

  The Sanity Inspector misrepresents Coleman’s essay as callous in order to give his own parting shot some resentful bite.

• Dr. Coleman may well feel that, whatever other faculty at Duke did or said, he’s entitled to speak freely about the lacrosse case because of the public stands he took when the case were being prosecuted as well has his considerable experience with the legal system.

  The Sanity Inspector seems to feel that the offense he endured while hearing and reading about the lacrosse case entitles him to cast aspersions, under cover of glib ignorance, on someone who gave a significant boost to the players when they really needed it.

If common shame was operative on Protein Wisdom, the Sanity Inspector would have been stripped of his neckerchief and drummed off the staff (have no fear, though — PW is a truly and awesomely shameless place). Oh, and by the way, anyone know if the Inspector is still beating his wife? **

One really annoying thing that’s happened in the last few months is that both the News and Observer and the Duke Chronicle have changed their URLs. None of the old links work any more. My blog is now full of broken links (I hesitate to think about how many there are in DIW). Since I was going through the N&O archive anyway to remind myself what Jim Coleman said about the case, I thought I might as well post the new links, and while I was doing that, why not pull out some representative quotes? And now that I’ve rounded all that stuff up, I’m feeling the need to pontificate a bit.

What the collection shows is how consistent, forthright, and pointed Coleman’s commentary was. Naturally it reflects his perspective on the legal system and his experience with it — the same things he brings to his work with the Duke Innocence Project. But while the lacrosse players were in legal jeopardy, he didn’t use the case to plug the Innocence Project and he didn’t rank the lacrosse players as more or less deserving of concern and help. The thing I found most interesting is his somewhat more expansive comments after the three indicted students were exonerated. In them he talks about the public reaction as well as the legal one. Again he doesn’t downplay what happened or try to refocus the discussion on some other, more deserving victims. Instead, he points out where and why people went wrong in their rush to judgment. He also comments that he hopes the case disabused people of the notion that the legal system only screws the poor and minorities (he doesn’t put it quite that way, of course).

The contrast between Coleman and KC Johnson is every bit as striking as the contrast between Coleman and any of Duke’s tenured radicals. If they were “only too willing to advance their personal, pedagogical, or ideological agendas on the backs of their own students,” Johnson has been only too willing to use their students as rhetorical pawns in response. Not that the lacrosse players minded. On the contrary, during the April 2007 press conference he was thanked by all three of the exonerated students. He was friendly and supportive both in person and in writing, and he helped fill a vacuum left by an academic community that couldn’t manage to work through its collective horror to a more complex and humane response, something I don’t think anyone at Duke should be allowed to forget. If Johnson was to some extent frying his own fish, that just meant that he poured more effort and intensity into his blog. My problem with all that is that he worked relentlessly to fan the flames and in the process churned out reams of thoroughly nasty and uninsightful criticism.

Last summer Johnson pointed out, apropos of nothing in particular except that I’d criticized him, that I was silent while “a District Attorney violating myriad procedures in an attempt to railroad three innocent students at Prof. Zimmerman’s own institution.” It’s a fine example of what it means to use “three innocent students” as rhetorical pawns, in this case just to shrug off some annoying criticism. It also sets up an implicit standard for what we should have been doing on campus back in 2006. And by that measure, Coleman’s performance was exemplary. When he commented about the legal situation, his overriding concern seems to have been the decent administration of justice, his immediate priority was derailing Nifong and he didn’t bother with anything else. It should be pretty obvious that Johnson was doing something quite different and yet I don’t think that the Sanity Inspector is the only person to overlook it. Johnson took to writing about the lacrosse case as part of an ongoing critique of academic culture. From the beginning his attention to the railroading in Wonderland was at least as much a way to energize his own agenda as it was an effort to stop the train.

I don’t mean to suggest that there’s a meaningful head-to-head comparison here. Coleman was approached both for his legal expertise and his Duke affiliation, and what made it into the news reflects not just what he said but also the choices of the reporters who interviewed him and their editors. The comments I’ve assembled are to some extent a product of the role he was playing, and that wasn’t a role that was open to Johnson. But the comparison sheds some light on what I think is an interesting question — was all the noise Johnson was making really serving the players’ interests? And the same general question applies to partisans all around. A couple of years ago I laid out my doubts that the potbanging protesters were offering any meaningful support to the lacrosse team’s accuser, who they idealized in a self-serving way. It looks to me like they were just co-opting a stranger’s misery for the cause. On the other side, “blog hooligans” turned the lacrosse team into poster boys and ran around trash-talking the enemies of their friends and demanding apologies on their behalf. A lot of it strikes me as little more than online potbanging. I suspect that by jettisoning all the self-indulgent crap, Coleman offered a lot more of a boost.

Anyway, here are some highlights from Coleman’s interviews in the News & Observer during the criminal phase of the lacrosse case (and a little past it).

• Duke prof: Rape case needs new prosecutor (Jun 13, 2006). This is what caused KC Johnson to write about Coleman tearing down the wall — the “Duke prof’s” opinion that Nifong should be replaced was the whole point of the story.

  Coleman said he’s followed the case closely in the newspapers but hasn’t spoken with any of the lawyers involved. He said he was disturbed by the transcript of the identification procedures, where a police officer told the accuser that she was about to look at photos of everyone who attended the party.

  “The officer was telling the witness that all are suspects, and say, in effect, ‘Pick three,’ ” Coleman said. “It’s so wrong; it had to be done for a reason other than identification.”

• DA’s statements, record at odds (Jun 15, 2006):

  “Either he knew what the facts were and misstated them, or he was making them up,” said James Coleman, a Duke law professor who has publicly requested that Nifong remove himself from the case. “Whether he acted knowing they were false, or if he was reckless, it doesn’t matter in the long run. This is the kind of stuff that causes the public to lose confidence in the justice system.”

• Suspects, dancer contradict accuser (Oct 16, 2006), about the lacrosse-case exposé on 60 Minutes:

  During the segment, James Coleman, a Duke University law professor, said he thought Nifong had committed prosecutorial misconduct by speaking out before charges were filed.

  “If this case resulted in a conviction, I think there would be a basis to have the conviction thrown out based on misconduct,” Coleman said.

• Duke attack story shifts (Jan 12, 2007):

  Critics, such as Duke law professor James Coleman, said the new document was a blatant attempt to fix a flawed case and called for a criminal investigation of Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong and his staff.

  “Who would believe that a witness, nine months later, suddenly recalls facts that coincidentally negate evidence produced by the defense?” said Coleman, who led a Duke committee that investigated the lacrosse team’s culture and has criticized Nifong’s handling of the case for months.

  “These people are almost criminal. It’s making a mockery of the system. It’s like Nifong is mooning the system. It’s contemptuous.”

• Durham DA may face another entanglement (Jun 7, 2007):

  James Coleman, a Nifong critic and a Duke University law professor who has followed the lacrosse case closely, lauded Smith for leaving the disciplinary possibility open.

  “Judges should not tolerate this crap,” Coleman said. “They see it all the time. If they don’t do anything about it, that’s how it keeps going on. [Nifong’s] behavior was a total affront to the court.”

  “Prosecutors can ruin lives very easily, they do it and clap their hands and say never mind and move on,” Coleman added. “Courts have basically ignored it. I’ve seen misconduct by prosecutors in a capital case where everyone recognizes the misconduct, but the judge declares it a harmless error. Then the prosecutors show up at the execution.”

Now a couple of quotes from the Duke Chronicle:

• Campus tunes in to ‘60 Minutes’ (Oct 16, 2006):

  Bradley also interviewed Duke law professor James Coleman, who decried the line-up used to bring charges against the three players.

  Coleman, who chaired a University committee last Spring that investigated the lacrosse program, has been involved in establishing the North Carolina standards for line-up procedures.

  “[Nifong] pandered to the community by saying, ‘I’m going to go out there and defend your interests in seeing that these hooligans who committed the crimes are going to be prosecuted,’” he said. “I think in this case, it appears that this prosecutor has set out to develop whatever evidence he could to convict people he already concluded were guilty.”

• Experts: DA’s case nearing ‘implosion’ (Jan 12, 2007):

  Under North Carolina law, a man can only be convicted of rape if there is sufficient evidence that his penis penetrated the victim’s vagina, law professor James Coleman said. In her most recent testimony, the alleged victim in the lacrosse case could not confirm that the object that entered her was a penis, forcing the prosecution to drop the rape charges.

  Coleman said the increasingly contradictory testimonies given by the alleged victim provides the defense with a valuable asset in getting the remaining charges dismissed.

  “The more significant effect is that it undermines the witness’s credibility on all the charges she has made,” Coleman said. “It’s extraordinary that a witness testimony changed so drastically nine months after the incident. A jury would find it hard to believe her. That’s just not credible. It’s like the end of a bad mystery novel where all the ends are tied up.”

Finally a few pieces from here and there in which Coleman commenting on things other than Nifong’s mismanagement and procedural misconduct.

• First, a letter he wrote to the Durham Herald-Sun in Oct. 2006, as quoted in DIW.

  Your editorial about the recent “60 Minutes” report mischaracterizes both what the district attorney’s role has been in the Duke lacrosse rape case and why some of us have criticized him. Like much of the media hype that has surrounded the case, your editorial turns the case into an ugly caricature by suggesting that the decision to prosecute the Duke students was made by a valiant prosecutor on a white horse who is defending a helpless black woman who “ranks near the bottom of society.” That is what the prosecutor also suggested when he told a largely African-American audience that he personally would protect “this black girl” from the hooligans at Duke. I find that characterization of the case offensive and patronizing. Why do you say the accuser is “near the bottom of society?” She is an apparently talented student and mother who dances to support herself and her child. She is a woman, not a “black girl.” Trying to make this case about race and class has done a great disservice to Durham. From the start, it should have been handled as just an alleged rape that had to be investigated and prosecuted if the evidence warranted it. As someone who has criticized Nifong’s handling of the case, I have not called for him to dismiss it; rather, I have suggested only that a special prosecutor be appointed who can make the kind of disinterested decisions about the case that Nifong has shown himself incapable of making. If the case goes to trial, it should be based on the strength of the evidence against the defendants, rather than as a convenient way to shift responsibility for ending what now appears to be a highly questionable prosecution to a judge or jury.

• This is from a a post-exoneration interview with CBS news, Apr. 12, 2007. This was an opportunity to talk about how the lacrosse players had it easy, but that’s not at all the route he took.

  Coleman … said that the circumstances surrounding the case ended up being “something of a perfect storm.”

  “It had all kind of elements, but we know now it was based on this false notion a crime had been committed,” he said. “That generated everything. That gave energy to everything.”

  The story, as it was portrayed in the media, was about class and race in a community surrounding an elite university…. The three accused represented — at least in the eyes of their critics — the privileged white students many felt were running wild on campus. But in the end, none of it was true, Coleman said.

  “It got reported that way over and over, and then it became fact,” he said. “You know, it took a year for the truth to catch up.”

  District Attorney Mike Nifong, Coleman said, was initially motivated by the belief that a crime had occurred but also saw it as an opportunity for him to gain fame and notoriety.

  “He was in a political race,” Coleman said. “You know, he rushed to judgment….”

  During the past year, there have been several stories about race and sports, including the recent debacle with radio host Don Imus and comments he made about the Rutgers women’s basketball team. Coleman says they are all related.

  “I think what’s happening is that athletes are treated like disposable items,” he said. “We forget they are human beings, students and have feelings, and we just ignore that. They are treated like commodities.”

• Here, finally, is what he told Robert Bliwise for the story “One Year Later”, which ran in the May-June 2007 issue of Duke Magazine.

  Lacrosse-committee chair Coleman—who also serves as faculty adviser for the Innocence Project, which investigates cases believed to have resulted in wrongful convictions—says he and his colleagues talked about the case constantly. But he acknowledges that faculty members (and civil-rights organizations) have been reticent to speak out against this particular prosecutorial transgression. That reticence, he says, in part may reflect “the strange role that race was playing in the case, which is that the prosecutor said that this was a predatory crime and one that was racially motivated.”

  Just as race-consciousness constrained discussion around the case, so too, he adds, did “the notion that rich people have all the help they need,” in legal proceedings and otherwise. He says he hopes that those who saw the lacrosse case in terms of such broad categories now realize the problems with their preconceptions. “People thought that whatever happens is happening to poor people and black people; it’s not a threat to me. This case says, the system isn’t functioning and it’s a threat to all of us.”

Disclaimer: I don’t know James Coleman, haven’t ever communicated with him, and have no inside information on him. He’s not responsible for anything I’ve written here.

* The TR post that stirred up the hornets nest was about Don Imus’s crack about the “nappy headed hos” playing basketball for Rutgers. Potter has since taken it down, but you can get a sense of the post and the controversy in her follow-up (go to the first comment for quotes from the problematic post).

** This is a loaded question, not a serious or factual claim. How could it be? I don’t even know who the guy is, much less how he treats his wife.

I have to say, though, that it turned out to be a relief to get away from this thing. When I stopped trying to write the blog I put Google Reader aside, too — I didn’t need to follow a dozen different blogs, some because I liked them and some because I really really didn’t like them. I’ve continued to get the daily HuffPost email but mostly ignored it. Going to that site is like stepping into a high school gym where a few dozen people are up on soapboxes shouting at the top of their lungs. It turns out that it’s a whole lot more pleasant to read The New Yorker and watch a little Jon Stewart now and then, just to check in on the crazies.

Going into the summer I had a backlog of half-written things that kept not getting written, and by August that had gotten pretty discouraging. I’m an intensely slow writer and also verbose — a bad combination. I’m hoping that someday I’ll figure out how to be a functional blogger, but the idea of leaving all that unfinished stuff to lurk on my hard disk is just too depressing. So before I can move on to either some better kind of blog or no blog at all, I need to wrap up this obsessive experiment that I started over two years ago.

Back in September 2008 I noted that I’d already spent way too much time picking apart Durham-in-Wonderland, KC Johnson’s blog. I had a few loose ends to deal with, I wrote, and “a wrap-up post mostly written.” Ha! I don’t even remember what that post was going to be, but apparently in morphed into something else. I got sidetracked looking at things Johnson has written about academic-culture issues other than the lacrosse case, I turned to some other things (music, even!) and then got sucked into a lacrosse blogosphere soap opera early in the summer.

Back in July, as the soap opera was in full swing, “One Spook” very helpfully pointed out my problem:

When you began commenting on the lacrosse case professor Zimmerman, I think Johnson and others, myself included, rightly or wrongly concluded that you as a faculty colleague of the Group of 88 might offer some new insight or new information in order to explain or even justify their unprecedented, craven, and tortious actions directed against their own students.

In all of your very wordy commentary, that has never happened and to me (and I believe Johnson and others) you’ve become a “One Trick Pony,” or, to strike a musical metaphor, “Johnny One-Note.”

It’s funny looking back at that, actually — it reminds me of how much fun it was to pop Spook’s sanctimonious bubble, and then Debrah’s, too. Not that either of them has the wit to realize it. But anyway, what I wrote then is still apropos.

I have to admit that Spook gets a few things right here. There’s no question that I’m wordy and that I’ve wasted way too many of those words on KC Johnson, to an extent that most sensible people think that either there’s some ulterior motive or there’s something seriously wrong with me (I’m leaning towards the latter).

I’ve kind of painted myself into a corner where every new post I write about KC Johnson makes me look more and more like a obsessive crackpot or stalker or something. But what the hell — the damage is pretty much done already. The stuff I have ready to post is about Johnson being treated, by people who should know better, as a serious and conscientious critic rather than a polemicist and self-appointed prosecutor. That’ll serve as a good wrap-up, I think.

But before I get to that, some miscellaneous odds and ends. Most of it is ancient history, I’m afraid.

Silly me! Last Wednesday I was getting ready to go to the coast and who should I hear from but the victim’s father. We ended up having a pleasant (given what we were talking about) phone conversation, and I learned a lot. The main thing he wanted to clear up was that he really has been in touch with Bill Anderson and Larry Moneta really did brush him off with that “very busy man” cliché. There’s plenty more I’d like to say about the situation but it will take me a while to put it together — I need to go over some things with Mr. Rouse again and see what else I can find out. But those are the essentials.

This is more a placeholder than a post. You can leave comments, if you want, but I won’t be clearing any. I welcome input from anyone with solid information or perspective. For instance, why was bail only $50k? (It seems, from this article, that $50k was what state guidelines dictated at the time, but there must be some latitude and discretion involved.) It would also be helpful to hear about cases that were handled well. I’m thinking especially of the academic side — it’s clear what law enforcement is supposed to do, but not quite as clear what a college should or can do. In this case Duke didn’t do what was needed to retain an excellent student even though she very much wanted to stay. That’s not the worst aspect of the whole story, but it looks to me like it was completely avoidable, and I find that very sad.

For background, here are some links. Refer to the comments I linked in the first paragraph for more caustic perspectives.

• “Victim from Bellmore gets on with her life” (Newsday, March 17, 2009).
• From the Duke Chronicle: Initial reports, Arrest, Summer 2008 court date set, Suspect jailed after second rape, Guilty plea.
• From the News and Observer: Initial report, Initial investigation, Arrest made, Details of the investigation, Suspect arrested for another rape, Muted reaction (compared to lacrosse), Guilty plea.

I will not be posting comments, but you can use the comment form to leave a message for me (you can also just email it — reharmonizer at an-earful dot com).

After connecting the dots, it looks like the unspoken complaint behind all that vehemence is that I’ve been terribly unfair to KC Johnson. And I thought it was about me! Or, if not, it was about students who were hounded by an unethical prosecutor and betrayed by their professors. But no, when Johnson strikes back at my criticism, the issue that comes up again and again is how harsh and unfair I’ve been to him. It’s an unseemly complaint, especially coming from a man who regularly puts other people down for acting like they’re “the victim.” So he writes around it. In the past he’s played up what he sees as an unreasonable discrepancy between my criticism of him (too strong) and my criticism of other more villainous figures (too mild). This time he invokes the whole lacrosse-case catastrophe in its tried-and-true Durham-in-Wonderland (DIW) packaging — students railroaded by a rogue DA while a rush-to-judgment faculty thanks protestors, etc. In relation to the points of mine he was responding to, it’s like swatting a fly with a sledgehammer. But that tableau has always been a weapon, and he’s used it so many times against his enemies that it really has become little more than a flyswatter. It seems that at this point no purpose is too trivial or self-serving to give it a whack. That makes me feel just fine about criticizing him so harshly.

Before I get into Johnson’s weirdly self-centered way of dealing with criticism here’s a quick and more current example of his habit of flirting suggestively with facts and issues without taking a stand. The bulk of his post about “‘Diversity’ and Duke Admissions” is a table of data collected at Duke, from an academic study relating to affirmative action. Johnson takes no position on the significance of the numbers in his handy table, but he does urge readers to “Recall that under federal law… private universities (such as Duke) that receive federal funds cannot use racial quotas in admissions policies.” Given a study attempting to shed some empirical light on the subtleties of a complex and thorny issue, it’s impressive how Johnson whittles it down to some “quite striking totals” that he leaves uninterpreted and a mealy-mouthed suggestion that Duke is breaking the law. It’s a textbook example of partisan hackery and also a warm-up for the exposé on Duke’s Campus Culture Initiative (CCI) that he recently finished. He has a cache of documents that he apparently picked up on the sly, and he’s been grinding them through the mill of his willful ignorance. Every now and then he packs the result into a little poison pill marked “in other words” or “Translation:” or “i.e.” (1). The CCI warrants close, critical scrutiny and the assumptions about diversity that informed it should absolutely be fair game for debate. Johnson has nothing constructive or intelligent to contribute on either level, though.

What Johnson writes about the CCI might, conceivably, have some real-world impact. What he writes about me, on the other hand, is inconsequential, and Johnson seems to put even less thought into it than he puts into the hatchet jobs he does on the bigwigs of the so-called “Group of 88.” It’s reflexive and so, I think, quite revealing. Since my post goes on way too long, I’ve divided it into sections. Hopefully that will make it easier to scan and to browse. And I’ve moved some of the digressions into notes (2).

If some people jumped off a cliff, would KC Johnson end up with a broken leg?

According to Wiktionary, ad hominem is “a fallacious objection to an argument or factual claim by appealing to a characteristic or belief of the person making the argument or claim,” or, in plain English, “an attempt to argue against an opponent’s idea by discrediting the opponent himself,” and there’s no denying that KC Johnson did exactly that when he ended a comment rebutting an earlier post of mine by pointing out that, back in 2006, bad things happened at Duke and I was silent. Our exchange is embedded in a sprawling controversy that’s relentlessly focussed on people’s characteristics and beliefs, so a little ad hominem is really no big deal. Still, when he gets around to really unloading on me, it’s entertaining to see him reiterate the same point about my silence, not once but twice, in order to show how hypocritical it was of me to accuse him of ad hominem in the first place.

Finally, Prof. Zimmerman’s new material in the post faults me for engaging in ad hominem attacks against him and the Group of 88, by writing that the DA was trying to “railroad three innocent students… [while] Prof. Zimmerman… was silent about their fate….”

I note that Prof. Zimmerman—while labeling my statement “lazy and cowardly,” an approach that “is especially effective with the thoughtless and bigoted,” part of a seeming tendency to write “bullshit” (some people might consider that an ad hominem attack!)—doesn’t in any way challenge the factual accuracy of what I said: [Zimmerman was silent, etc. etc.].

In those two paragraphs of fussing and fuming it seems like Johnson is criticizing me in no uncertain terms, but really he isn’t. It’s a collection of facts and references delivered in a tone of righteous indignation — it puts me in a bad light, for sure — but the closest he comes to actual criticism is the weasel-worded suggestion that “some people might consider that an ad hominem attack!” Is he one of those people? Does he really believe that it’s ad hominem when I describe things he’s written as bullshit? Is he saying that I’m wrong when I “fault[ him] for engaging in ad hominem attacks”? What does it matter that I haven’t “challenge[d] the factual accuracy of what [he] said” about the circumstances three years ago? What does it say about me that I didn’t speak up for those students? And what does my silence back then have to do with anything that I’d put on the table in my post? I doubt that he’d deny making a countercharge of ad hominem, but otherwise those are all open questions, and he’s free to accept or disavow any answer you come up with.

This kind of writing, full of implication and insinuation with few if any explicit statements about the meaning or significance or seriousness of things, is not at all unusual on DIW. The folks who read their prejudice and spite into it get a lot out of it, and I really am convinced that it’s “an approach that ‘is especially effective with the thoughtless and bigoted.’” I’ve explained that opinion at length. Johnson can take it personally if he wants, but to suggest that it’s ad homimen is ridiculous — the point of it is not at all to direct attention away from his writing and onto his person. It’s possible that he’s intentionally sending ill-defined signals that are open to all sorts of interpretations. My assumption, though, is that he has a fairly specific message in mind and he’s beating around the bush. And whatever his intentions are, his failure to be upfront while writing about me is my license to interpret. Same with the ridiculous stories he’s concocted about my criticism to make himself look good.

I am put in my place

In the post that set the stage for our little war of words, I described a story he’d passed on about Karla Holloway as a foolish rumor. She emailed me and called it “an absolute and patent falsehood.” Adding that quote to my post was enough to prompt Johnson to leave his first comment here in about a year and a half. He starts it by urging Holloway to drop by DIW and air her “‘views’” there. No doubt he’d be thrilled if she took him up on the invitation, but mostly he’s grandstanding — the scare quotes give it away. In the rest of the comment he addresses a couple of points I’d made about an interview with him in the Duke Chronicle and then, apropos of nothing in particular, turns back to 2006 and my silence.

Two other points. Prof. Zimmerman claims that I used a “moderator’s veto” regarding his comments. It is not clear to me when I did so; I have regularly posted his comments at DIW. Indeed, I have publicly pointed out that, as the Group of 88 has consistently refused to defend their actions in and positions about the case, his stance as a public apologist for the Group is an important one, in that it allows neutral observers at least some insight into what might be the Group’s thinking.

Second, Prof. Zimmerman asks why I did not engage in “critical self-reflection” after a hostile Chronicle letter from Jim Coleman. While, as I noted at the time, I was curious why Prof. Coleman had chosen not to raise his rather harsh criticisms in any of the 21 personal exchanges (including a lengthy interview) I had with him before fall 2007, he and I had a lengthy email exchange following his letter. To the best of my knowledge, Prof. Coleman has never cited one specific item in either DIW or the book to corroborate his claims; he did not do so in the private email exchange, either. I should also note that he did not endorse my subsequent call for a Coleman Committee-style inquiry into how the faculty responded to the case.

Finally, a general point: this case featured a District Attorney violating myriad procedures in an attempt to railroad three innocent students at Prof. Zimmerman’s own institution. During the time those students were in harm’s way, Prof. Zimmerman, to the best of my knowledge, was silent about their fate, while 88 of his colleagues signed a public statement which (even in the peculiar claim of Charles Piot that it referred only to protesters at a March 27, 2006 campus gathering) thanked protesters who had presumed the students’ guilt. To the best of my knowledge, none of the signatories of this document have ever publicly apologized for its issuance; the two signatories who privately apologized subsequently retracted their apologies.

That final paragraph is what he cites and then rehashes in the first passage I quoted. His remark after that is, “Somehow, Prof. Zimmerman’s disinclination to challenge that assertion doesn’t surprise me.” I have to wonder, first of all, what kind of fool he takes me for, and then more to the point, what’s to challenge? It’s no secret that I was disengaged from what was happening on campus when the lacrosse case broke, since I said so in my first post about the case. I don’t blame anyone for wondering what, exactly, was going on with me when the shit hit the fan, and the main thing is simple enough — a last-ditch push to finish my doctorate. But there’s never been a good reason for me to dwell on personal details that have nothing to do with the case. There’s nothing I need to explain away or be excused for.

Putting people in their place is a constant and ongoing project on DIW, and those three paragraphs are a pretty good sample of the approaches Johnson has taken in my case. Rebuttal is one option, either of my criticism or, more likely, a pale imitation of it. The question he answered in his second point isn’t the one I asked but something more like, “how did you justify it to yourself when you shrugged off Coleman’s criticism?” (3) Another approach is to package me with the “Group,” which at this point is just a matter of applying “Group apologist” as an epithet (or maybe it’s a title). Johnson must think he’s identified one of my key characteristics with respect to the case, and the only purpose that’s served by doggedly sticking the label to my name is to influence the way my criticism is read. Isn’t there’s a Latin term for that?

That load of “factual accuracy” seemed to come out of left field when Johnson dropped it on me, but now I see that it also fits into a pattern that goes back to his earliest responses to my criticism. It’s clever the way he slips it in as a “general point,” though, and also clever to say nothing about why it’s there or what it’s supposed to signify. There must be several plausible ways to interpret it. It looked to me like an invitation to pass judgment that Johnson extended without risking an opinion on what that judgment should be. Furthermore, putting the whole weight of the scandal behind it struck me as both excessive and petty. So my first reaction was to call it lazy and cowardly — not, in retrospect, a very insightful way to put it, but I don’t think it was out of line, either. When he was challenged in his comment thread he finally managed to narrow down the implications. The business about my silence in the face of a railroading DA, it turns out, “does shine some light on [my] priorities.” It’s still up to you to figure out what’s being illuminated, but he’s left some pretty good clues.

Whatever I say, all it means is that I’m mean

In fact, now I can see that he’s been questioning my priorities for a long time, with one thing firmly in mind — my criticism of him. At first the main focus was certain harsh terms I’d used to describe DIW. In his December 2007 post about me and the “Group of 88 rehab tour,” he spends a lot of time wondering how I “reach[ed my] conclusion about the “insidiously polarizing,” “irrational,” and “anti-academic” [nature] of DIW.” He’d already suggested in an email that those descriptions might really apply to me. In the post he tried them out on a few others who, he seemed to think, deserved the harsh treatment much more than he did. First the potbangers — not only did I neglect to apply the same harsh terms, I even looked “benevolently” on their motives (but then I wasn’t criticizing Johnson’s motives, was I?). And I didn’t apply them to Clare Potter, despite her comments about “students from Zimmerman’s own university [that] were demonstrably false and arguably defamatory.” Zeroing in on a passage from a review of his book that I’d quoted with approval, he wrote in a comment on my blog that “Some people might consider calling members of the faculty ‘crackpots’ to be ‘insidiously polarizing,’ ‘irrational,’ and ‘anti-academic’.” So true, and they’d all be hacks! In context the word is completely innocuous, so once again weasel-wording is key. Finally, he asks whether I’d apply the same three terms to the lacrosse players’ defense team. I wouldn’t — unlike Johnson, I know the difference between a defense attorney and a critic.

In all the attention he gives to those noxious terms of mine, his overriding concern is who they’re applied to. There’s no sign in what he writes that I might be using them to mean something — it’s as if I picked them out at random just to make him look bad (I didn’t, by the way, and I think they’ve held up well). If they don’t have any meaning when they’re applied to him, they don’t have to have any meaning when they’re applied to anyone else, either. So, for instance, while I do fault the potbangers for their definitive contribution to all the divisiveness that followed, there was nothing insidious about them — their protest was blatantly provocative, not to mention foolish and self-defeating. Johnson acknowledges my willingness to criticize the potbangers as a welcome development, but beyond that bare fact he notices nothing in all that I wrote about them except the unfairness of it, to him.

At the end of our first email exchange he did some weasel-worded questioning of my “veracity.” I’d left a comment on Claire Potter’s blog agreeing that he deserved the turkey award she’d given him (it was Thanksgiving). He found the comment hard to reconcile with the rash claim I’d made in one email that I wasn’t describing him in unflattering terms, I was describing his blog that way. A couple of weeks later I put up a long post that portrays him as the “other prosecutor” in the lacrosse case. “Most people,” he points out, without pinning himself down one way or another, would say that “suggesting that someone [is]… scarcely more principled than Nifong is describing that person in unflattering terms.” So they would — I found the irony irresistible, and maybe I got carried away. But my main point was that, writing about the situation at Duke, Johnson was acting much more like a prosecutor than an analyst, so his blog was long on incrimination and very short on insight. He chose not to notice the analogy but instead to dwell on the unflattering nature of the criticism, not directly but by way of an apparent conflict with one prickly line in a prickly email exchange. That, I think, says a lot about his priorities, namely that creating the impression he’s suffered abuse ranks very high — well above explaining or defending his criticism.

It’s more of the same when he takes up ad hominem in his post a couple months ago — he sets aside the primary meaning of the term and instead plays up the connotation of an unfair personal attack. He seems to imply that there are three things I wrote that are “ad hominem attacks” but only one has any traction. It’s true that there’s some irony to the way I describe his “pure ad hominem” as “a lazy and cowardly response.” What I was calling attention to, though, is the “general point” at the end of his comment, which willfully shifts the focus away from my criticism and onto my actions and character. Ad hominem is exactly the right term to describe that move. The characterization I threw back may have been petty, but it wasn’t taking the place of a more substantive response, since his point didn’t warrant such a response in the first place.

I’ll give full credit to Johnson for one thing — he’s found the greatest way ever to duck criticism. It’s especially suited to narcissists with a persecution complex. All you have to do is notice nothing except how inappropriately harsh your critic has been to you. If that’s the only issue, the counterattack is dead easy. You skim off the tone and a few unflattering implications and leave the rest alone — in this case, he doesn’t even have to read all this verbose stuff. The only trick is that you can’t be upfront about what you’re doing or you’ll look like a whiny lightweight.

Anyway, the most recent message about my priorities is not how dare Prof. Zimmerman not speak up for those students being railroaded, it’s how dare Prof. Zimmerman criticize me, KC Johnson (another excellent reason for me to keep it up). This message isn’t reserved for me, of course. When he and Stuart Taylor responded to the Coleman-Kasibhatla letter with their own letter to the Chronicle, their general reaction was that the criticism coming from Coleman is puzzling. You can still see the puzzlement in the quotes above. Why had Coleman “chosen not to raise his rather harsh criticisms in any of the 21 personal exchanges,” etc. etc.? Why me? Why now? (4) That’s a natural reaction — if I was in their shoes I would probably have felt the same way — but as the basis for a reply it’s pretty feeble, especially when the critic you’re answering is one of your primary sources of credibility.

A most peculiar form of weasel-speak

There are a few vague, euphemistic adjectives that Johnson habitually uses when more precise ones are called for. It’s another way he has of not saying what he means, and sometimes he’ll even make a show of it. For instance, he obviously thinks I did something pretty manipulative to the text of my earlier post. But when it comes down to it, the best he can do, or the best he wants to do, is to show how very difficult it is to find the right word.

Prof. Zimmerman responded to those comments by eliminating his allegation against me from his post, without indicating that he has altered his post—an … unusual … approach to blogging.

The gesture with the ellipsis only makes sense if the word in the middle is suggestive — it wouldn’t work to write that I’d taken a … dishonest … approach to blogging. With “unusual” it’s like a line from a B-movie. We have … unusual … ways of making you tahhhhlk, Mr. Bond!. When Johnson starts a more recent post by alluding to the “two … intriguing … items” he’s going to critique, the impression is more of hands rubbing together in anticipation. Her Majesty’s forthcoming visit to my charming little island offers such … intriguing … possibilities, Mr. Bond! Unless it’s tongue-in-cheek, and I don’t see any sign that it is, this is an awfully flaky affectation to be dropping into a supposedly no-nonsense analysis. If insinuation wasn’t so constant on DIW it would stick out like a sore thumb.

The words “unusual” and “peculiar” are vastly overused on DIW. Like my approach to blogging, my decision to criticize Johnson after being silent is also unusual. The last post I wrote is about an “unusual take on the legacy of the lacrosse case.” (5) Look back at Johnson’s “general point” and you’ll see that a certain claim made by Charles Piot isn’t far-fetched or questionable, it’s peculiar. Search DIW for “peculiar” and you’ll find a post about “The Times’ Peculiar Corrections Policy,” three posts about Peculiar Motions by Duke and Nifong, and a couple more about the Herald Sun’s Peculiar Policies.

It’s not that precise characterization is beyond his grasp. Much of his writing about Mike Nifong is fairly direct — the reference to “a rogue DA [who] railroaded three innocent students” is a description that takes a stand — and so is his latest harangue about Selena Roberts. Perhaps that kind of writing is as common on DIW as the vague and insinuating kind. (6) I really don’t know, but for the record, I’m not claiming that Johnson is never forthright. When he’s not, though, it seems to be a matter of choice — there’s nothing I can see about all those unusual and peculiar things that kept him from finding more precise and descriptive terms.

There’s a schoolmarmish quality to the way Johnson lapses into euphemism and also to his apparent aversion to strong language. (7) When he was carping about Stuart Rojstaczer’s crackpot crack, Johnson remarked that he “never used such a term to describe any faculty member at Duke.” It’s a good thing, too, if he’s really as clueless as he seems about the word’s connotations. When Debrah called attention to one of my posts late last year, he commented that I “often employ[] expletives in [my] posts” — a prim allusion to “bullshit,” though the word isn’t actually an expletive (it’s not ad hominem, either). Expletives are meaningless exclamations. It’s true that the word bullshit can be used that way, but most of the time it means something. I’ve spelled out what I mean by it, anyway (not that mere explanation will stop Johnson from acting as if I’m just flinging a dirty word in his direction). After a few years worth of hints and allegations about the moral degeneracy and dangerality of a certain contingent of professors, Johnson has shown that its quite easy to telegraph crude judgments without using any crude language. So while I assume that his sense of propriety is genuine, in practice it comes across as a way to avoid taking any responsibility for his messages he’s sending.

If he doesn’t say what he means, does he mean what he says?

Because the real problem with all that vagueness and indirection is clearest if there’s more at stake, I’m going to set aside the little squabble between Johnson and me and look at one of the most inflammatory elements of his “Group of 88” crusade — the connection he draws between those professors and the potbangers’ “Castrate” banner. It’s couched in an artfully indirect formula that goes something like this: “The 88 “said ‘thank you’ to protesters who, among other things, had carried ‘CASTRATE’ banners….” (there was only one such banner, so that time he slipped in some exaggeration). It looks to me like that slogan was not widely reported at the time of the protests, so the only legitimate connections that can be drawn to people who weren’t on hand to see it are oblique ones — naiveté or failure to investigate, for instance.

If Johnson wants the linkage to be part of his case against the 88, he should be able to translate it into more specific claims relating the professors to that particularly foolish and revolting banner. With that in mind, in my “other prosecutor” post I raised some questions about what he thought those professors knew about the banner and at what level they approved of it. The questions were rhetorical but Johnson ostentatiously took them up anyway. “My answer to these questions is a straightforward one,” he says, and then proceeds to answer none of them: “I believe… that the 88 signatories to the statement… meant what they said, and said what they meant.” Their “thank you” was unqualified, so it applied to anyone labelled “protestor.” Johnson, unlike those foolish signatories, carefully avoids saying what he means. In this case he may not have much choice, because when he recites the lines about how those professors thanked protestors who displayed a “Castrate” banner, it seems that all he means is that they can be criticized for thanking protestors who displayed a “Castrate” banner. They’re extreme left-wing race/class/gender zealots, after all — what more do you need to know?

When pictures of that banner surfaced months after the protest, Johnson put the image to work straightaway as a blunt instrument, handy for rhetorical thuggery. For it to be evidence and not just an ignorant tool there would have to be some effort to put it into context, ideally an effort that grew out of genuine curiosity about how it fit into the protest and why it emerged into the lacrosse-case discussion only after such a long delay. But the culture-war polemic is an agenda-driven enterprise that has little if any use for curiosity. Without any interest in things that don’t serve the narrowly-defined case at hand, we should at least be able to expect a self-appointed prosecutor to be forthright about the charges, and that includes making specific and meaningful connections between the accused and the evidence of their wrongdoing. I can’t point to any authority to back me up on this, but it seems like a minimal standard to meet if you’re going to hold people who aren’t public figures up to public scorn.

Moderator’s veto?! Of course not! That apologist leaves such valuable comments!

The diatribe blasting me that Johnson posted on DIW is basically an expansion of the three paragraphs I quoted near the beginning of this post, with extra emphasis on my “serious allegation” that he once cut me off at the end of an exchange of comments. One thing — maybe the main thing — that provoked him to move the complaint from my comment thread to his blog was his mistaken impression that I’d just modified my post in order to misrepresent his position and cover my tracks (that’s my “… unusual … approach to blogging.”). He has a point about misrepresentation — it was cavalier of me to read his claim that “It is not clear to me when I did so” as “he doesn’t know,” and I should have changed the characterization when his position became, “To the best of my knowledge, I have cleared every comment.” But the update he objects to was added to the post on April 22, when I cleared his first comment. He left a couple more before he noticed the update on May 2. And my line about a moderator’s veto was never part of the post — it’s always been in the first comment.

I’ve written twice before about that exchange back in April 2008. Both times I made it clear that there’s no way for me to know for sure why my last comment didn’t appear — I have no argument with Johnson’s list of five conceivable explanations. But my experience fits a pattern. Two recent exchanges on DIW ended with Johnson posting what he had decided was the last word and then cutting off the commenter. In the second one, his parting shot was basically “thank you for making my point.” The subsequent comment — the one that wasn’t cleared — politely disagrees about having made Johnson’s point and then it highlights a factual error, debunking the revisionist theory Johnson had been building on it. Whatever reason Johnson had for not clearing that comment — there aren’t any good ones — the effect is to insure that his heavy-handed reinterpretation stands as the last word. That was my experience, as well, so I think that whether or not Johnson actually rejected my comment, I drew the right conclusion — Johnson is as manipulative in his moderating as he is in his reporting (I think that, rather than the lack of “college-level comprehension skills,” is what’s behind the confusion that Johnson addressed a few days ago with this bit of world-class condescension.) That’s not, as he seems to think, a claim that he has “a disinclination to debate [me],” it’s a claim that he’s disinclined to engage in what I would consider a worthwhile debate (I never claimed that my “viewpoint was excluded at DIW,” either — that’s just a straw man).

It’s funny how he reacted to the charge that he’d offed one of my comments — he started arguing that the things I’d written about the lacrosse case had value. Not in a complementary way, of course, but still, “[Zimmerman’s] stance as a public apologist for the Group is an important one, in that it allows neutral observers at least some insight into what might be the Group’s thinking” (he claimed that he’d made the point before — if so, I can’t find it). It’s hard to reconcile that line of reasoning with the extremely sparse attention he’s paid to my blog since I finished the first batch of posts about the case back in late 2007. (8) I’ve written about “Group members” Tim Tyson, Cathy Davidson, and William Chafe without, it seems, providing any insight worth taking note of. The same goes for my long pieces about Karla Holloway and Mark Anthony Neal, which would surely qualify as “apologia” in Johnson’s book. Maybe it’s only the half-dozen comments I left on DIW that provide insight. (9) The first one I left was useful to him, for sure, and in fact it’s the only thing I’ve written that elicited an informative response from him. Or it could be that he doesn’t direct his readers to my blog for insight because he knows that there are no longer any “neutral observers” reading his.

Fighting groupthink with bullshit

He found it useful to bring me and my comments up again, a few weeks later, when a commenter asked about whether groupthink was a problem on blogs. Johnson’s answer cites the value of my perspective in a somewhat more plausible way, though the answer still doesn’t reflect very well on him.

[Bauerlein’s law of group polarization] would apply, in theory, to any entity in which alternative views are excluded or silenced (one reason I am very careful not to discriminate on the basis of content in clearing comments, even if that means clearing comments very critical of me, such as those of the Group apologist, Prof. Zimmerman).

To see what’s going on in Johnson’s comments about my comments it helps to break them down into what’s said, what’s implied, and what’s left out entirely.

• Explicit. He clears my comments, and furthermore they’re “very critical” of him. In his post he gets a little more specific the insight my comments afford — I “play[] an important role in communicating the basic mindset of Group members.” I assume this is the essence of being what I most explicitly am, a “Group apologist,” though Johnson doesn’t exactly say so.
• Implied. What I’ve written has some value, since it provides “at least some insight.” But this isn’t on the strength of my arguments, because I’m nothing but an apologist, and for a group that deserves nothing but scorn. So I’m basically a specimen of a wrongheaded mindset who happens to be more communicative than others who share it (I have always treated Johnson as a specimen, too, so in that respect we’re even). (10)
• Left out. There’s no example of an insight that was gleaned from something I wrote. There’s no description of the kinds of insight that can or have been gleaned. There is no reference to any comment or argument I’ve made. There is, in short, absolutely nothing concrete to back up his claims. And he’s never explained how it is that I’m an apologist and not a critic.

What that tells me is that Johnson’s remarks about my important role are largely bullshit. The effort and attention goes, first of all, into the explicit message (he clears my comments) then into the implicit message (those comments have value). Add the two together and you have a handy little refutation of that odious charge I leveled at him: of course I clear Prof. Zimmerman’s comments, I wouldn’t deprive my readers of valuable insight, would I? Like a senile uncle or a man who’s protesting too much, he repeats the point about my (unintentional) public service in three successive comments and a post. While it’s worth repeating, it’s not worth substantiating, not even a little teeny-weeny bit. So what really matters here is making the right impression. Establishing that there’s some truth behind it isn’t worth the bother. If Harry G. Frankfurt is right that bullshit represents a “lack of connection to a concern with truth” while “making assertions without paying attention to anything except what it suits one to say,” then Johnson’s priorities here are exactly what you’d expect from a bullshitter.

Johnson’s remark about groupthink and blogs is tangential to the topic he was supposedly addressing in a funny and revealing way. If he wanted to distance his blog from groupthink, presumably he’d point to critics who challenged his arguments in a way that sharpened them or broadened his perspective.(11) But no, he dredges up a mere apologist who has apparently never laid a glove on his analysis. I am, in fact, just another piece of evidence that Johnson has been dead right since the moment in April 2006 when he found a smoking gun covered with the fingerprints of 88 perfect offenders. That’s some priceless irony, and a fine illustration of the role alternative views play in DIW, which is to be ignored unless they’re fodder to be dismissed and attacked. So, if the message isn’t really about groupthink, what is it about? What he says outright is (a) he always clears my comments and (b) they are oh so critical of KC Johnson (and not, or instance, good or bad or sharp or dull or right or wrong). Those seven comments must have been quite a burden. The same goes for the three or so email queries I’ve sent him. (12) I would never have guessed that being a responsible demagogue was such a strain.

The victim game

One of the prefab criticisms that Johnson trots out most frequently is that so-and-so claims s/he is the victim in the case (in two recent posts, so-and-so has been first the Trinity Heights Action Committee and then Selena Roberts, in the past its been various “Group members” — Karla Holloway, for instance). With respect to my claim that he didn’t clear a comment of mine, he points out that it’s possible that “[Zimmerman] never wrote the comment, and is now presenting himself as the victim.” As a hypothetical I have no problem with that, but it’s still an indication of how ready he is to think in terms of “the victim.”

I don’t think it’s hard to understand how aggravating lacrosse-case-related complaints can be when they come from people who publicly prejudged the team’s guilt or who piled on with social and political agendas at the team’s expense. It’s fair to expect some awareness of the difference between being vilified in blogs and being charged with a felony and then thrown under the bus by the legal system and your own college. In a series of comments he recently left here, Michael Gustafson wrote about a group that undercut its credibility by “trying to use a narrow-focused presentation of the case to their advantage” without confronting its “big deals,” namely “rushes to judgment coupled with severely unethical behavior on the part of appointed and elected officials, fanned by a media unable to restrain itself from exploiting a story that was, in fact, too ‘good’ to be true.” The specifics don’t apply here, but Gus framed the general issue quite well. Johnson, on the other hand, doesn’t frame anything when he writes about how someone is claiming to be the victim. It’s just a cheap shot, reflexive if not envious.

Nobody writing about the lacrosse case has gotten more mileage out of victimization than Johnson. He’s made the lacrosse players into poster boys for a crusade — their victimization is not so much acknowledged or analyzed as it is enshrined. Johnson’s sensitivity to the injustice done to him is, in some contexts, dominant to the point of blotting out everything else. (13) The sense of victimization, which is generally an undercurrent and rarely forthright, is a great way to nurture grievance but it has nothing to contribute to rational criticism or debate — yet another indication of Johnson’s dismal priorities.

Afterthought: the May pile-on

Not long after Johnson said his piece about my criticism he took a fair amount of heat from both John in Carolina and Joan Foster — two people who are usually far friendlier to DIW than I am. I can’t resist commenting on a few things that came up in the pile-on.

The standout from John in Carolina is that he chose to call Johnson to the mat for “sliming” Wahneema Lubiano. Johnson had described an innocent passage in an interview as “[i]nformation about Lubiano’s drinking habits.” That’s typical of the way he reads anything written by a “Group of 88 stalwart” — like a drug-sniffing dog, he’s fixated on the search for incriminating evidence. John’s reaction is direct and cogent — “You took an innocent remark by Lubiano and used it to slime her at the outset of your post. A thoughtful person wouldn’t do such a thing.”

And yet, out of all the things Johnson has written about Lubiano, it’s odd to see this one singled out for such strong condemnation. It’s trivial compared to his casual suggestion that “she has used [her] position to rally opposition to her own institution’s students, the ‘perfect offenders’ whose conviction she believes will advance her pedagogical and ideological agenda” (my emphasis). That looks to me not so much like sliming as outright defamation. But we all have our sensitivities — I’m sure there are plenty of things that I’ve gotten irate about that seem silly to others (in this post, even, I bet).

Johnson also tangled with the indefatigable Joan Foster — in fact the two disputes bled into each other. Joan posted their correspondence to LieStoppers. Somewhere in the middle (would it be too much to ask for a little formatting?), he lumps her in with a collection of nefarious figures, including yours truly:

…at various points in the case, figures such as Bob Ashley, Duke administrators or Group of 88 members, and even Group apologists such as Charlie Piot and Robert Zimmerman have suggested that the opinions expressed in stray, vile, anonymous emails should be considered those of the authors of the blog on the case. I have consistently stated that this line of attack is patently unfair.

I agree with him — it’s a facile argument, and it’s unfair. Maybe that’s why he hears that particular argument whenever a critic turns their attention to his comment threads — he’s well practiced at construing things as unfair to him. Some of his critics might have claimed that his commenters’ opinions are simply echoes of his own, but I haven’t, and neither has Joan. Her complaint is about personal attacks against her that he’s cleared, despite his comment policy. Her point (as I see it, anyway) is not that Debrah’s caustic ravings represent Johnson’s opinion.

My angle on the DIW comments is that they are a window into his message, not his opinion. Knee-jerk ridicule is staple in his comment threads, and it often lapses into caricature and various shades of bigotry. The majority of these commenters are registering strong agreement with Johnson. Whether or not they share Johnson’s opinion is irrelevant. He’s had years to separate his message from their opinion and he’s made no effort to do so. Quite the opposite — at times he’s egged them on. But the real problem is more fundamental. Wonderland is a construction in black and white, so by design it caters to a knee-jerk mindset.

NOTES

1. Johnson may well be right that “the CCI already had the answers to their questions, before even going through the motions of compiling the data,” or at least what they’d answered the fundamental questions without the data and all it added was some fine tuning. He’s approached his project in much the same way. That makes for a pretty good head-to-head comparison that shows in a nutshell why I’ve been so much more critical of Johnson than of the so-called “Group of 88.” On one hand, there’s an agenda-driven initiative that, based my experience of the school, connects to real people and real issues on a real campus, even if the connections are selective and self-serving and sloppy. On the other hand, there’s someone a few states away taking small-minded, vindictive potshots at the Wonderland he’s created just for that purpose, continuing a three-year-long record of treated the few people at Duke that he notices as either heroes or pawns. Fair or not, to me Johnson’s agenda-driven analysis is the more offensive of the two — it’s really no contest. (back)

2. Like this one. (back)

3. This is exactly why I wish the student interviewer in the Chronicle had raised the question. I already knew that the only answer I’d get would be a legalistic brick wall. (back)

4. The three paragraphs of Taylor and Johnson’s response (it’s mostly Johnson’s, I think) to the Coleman-Kasibhatla letter boil down to this (my paraphrases in italics take a great deal of interpretive license, so make sure you read the real thing before you draw any conclusions):

   1. Why me? (but… but… I just said something nice about President Brodhead!)
   2. Why now? Also what seems like the most substantive response in the letter, that Taylor and Johnson had quoted the sections of the committee report that detailed the lacrosse team’s alcohol-ralated problems.
   3. The counterattack. First a mealy-mouthed line that lumps the surprise attackers from Duke with “defenders of the academic status quo.” Then a demogogic exercise in turning the tables by “invit[ing Coleman and Kasibhatla] to join us in calling for a comprehensive review… of the faculty’s response to the lacrosse case.” It’s a sincerity test that Coleman and I have both failed, and Johnson even feels that it gives him points for “critical self-reflection.” (back)

5. The response from Taylor and Johnson points out a couple of unusual/peculiar things about the criticism Coleman and Kasibhatla dished out (the peculiar word choice is one sign that Johnson did the writing). It was, first of all, “peculiar” of Coleman to criticize them for misrepresenting his committee’s report when they quoted the relevant part in their book. Also, “it seems unusual to portray a book with more than 1,000 sourcenotes as based on a ‘tragic rush to judgment’ regarding faculty activists’ behavior.” Johnson got the wrong culprit, but his word choice isn’t so bad — the judgment in question was rendered in April 2006, before a book was in the works, so Johnson’s diligent effort to sourcenote his rush may be genuinely unusual. (back)

6. Johnson’s sense that he’s nailed the extremist mindset of the “Group” means that he is sometimes much more forthright when he’s putting words in their mouth than when he’s speaking for himself. For instance, writing about the Campus Culture Initiative, he can distill the words of extremists down to forthright nuggets of bullshit (“Translation: Most male students at Duke are sexists”). The misplaced clarity is ironic but it shouldn’t be a surprise. One of Johnson’s most effective polemical techniques is to reduce “extremist” views to clear-cut caricatures. Another is to avoid taking stands that have to be defended. Together they keep the extremists in the hot seat and Johnson out of it. (back)

7. Charles Piot put it well when he wrote that, compared to the DIW commentariat, Johnson “maintains a certain decorum.” (back)

8. It’s my impression that Johnson leaves the actual reading of my blog up to Debrah, and that turns out to be a pretty good arrangement for all of us. From Johnson’s perspective the stuff I write is, I expect, either impenetrable or just annoying. It gives Debrah a way to feel useful. And it’s fine for me, too — if Johnson leaves comments I usually feel compelled to write some kind of response, but Debrah’s I can usually toss. (back)

9. At the time Johnson wrote about the comments of mine that he’s “regularly posted” on his blog, he was referring to a grand total of 6 of them. The first 4 were in one thread. The fifth and last one I wrote for that thread is the one that never showed up. That experience, as I said, cured me of writing comments for DIW, aside from a couple of short tweaky ones nearly a year apart. So, of the 7 comments I’d written, 6 appeared online — 86%. More recently I posted a correction about those “unusual” blogging techniques Johnson accused me of. He felt compelled to note at the time that it “was cleared by me—as has been, to my knowledge, every comment Prof. Zimmerman has made at DIW.” Did I ever suggest that he systematically rejected my comments, or in fact that he rejected more than one of them? No. But some of those comments are very critical of him, so let’s give the man credit — he’s done the right thing with 7 of them, and it’s a good thing he didn’t have to OK that other one because it was really mean. (back)

10. Another way to say this (that Johnson and I treat each other as speciments) is that we treat each other as part of the problem, not part of a debate — as “Group apologist,” what I write is symptomatic of the mindset behind the group, while to me, Johnson is a fine specimen of an especially adept culture-war hack. That makes it very unlikely that anything resembling a worthwhile debate will happen between the two of us. And it makes me think that, in general, ad hominem isn’t an issue we should get too wrapped up with. The lacrosse case is a scandal, not a debate — the focus of it is not a proposition but the behavior of the people involved. (back)

11. He might have brought up Timothy Burke or Scott Eric Kaufman or Claire Potter, but there’s barely a peep about their criticism of DIW in DIW. Potter figures in DIW, for sure, but like me she’s a specimen. And of course there’s a couple of paragraphs from Coleman and Kasibhatla that weren’t specific enough to be taken seriously. (back)

12. At the beginning of an email to Joan Foster, Johnson noted that “I even have been willing to respond to all email requests for information from me from figures such as the Group of 88 apologist, Duke professor Robert Zimmerman.” It’s a little odd that he puts it that way after writing about how John in Carolina might have “done me the courtesy of emailing me with his recent list of questions about my posts.” In the same spirit, before he answered my questions about the “Castrate” banner he pointed out that “[Zimmerman] did not e-mail for a response to these questions before posting them.” Looks to me like he’s having some cake and eating it too.

    Anyway, I’ve sent him two requests of information. One of them, about Kerry Haynie, generated a brief exchange. (back)

13. I’m getting very close, here, to an argument that I’ve tried to resist. Here it is in the words of the anonymous author of The Truth about KC Johnson, for instance:

    Johnson was initially denied tenure at Brooklyn College, and blamed this in part on the forces of political correctness and the supposed left-wing domination of American universities. The Duke lacrosse case gave him his chance for revenge.

    My question is, why does his motivation matter? With enough intellectual integrity even someone motivated by revenge can write an incisive critique. And what seems to have happened in practice is that people have dismissed not only the critic but some of the very legitimate issues that he’s taken up. It’s the product that matters, not the motivation. And the excessive attention to victimization is right there in the product. It’s entirely plausible that revenge is the motivation, but it really doesn’t matter. (back)

The 2006 Lacrosse incident thrust the disruptive and abusive behaviors caused by Duke party houses into a harsh national media spotlight. Although this incident had enormous negative consequences — legal and financial — for both Duke and Durham, it is by no means clear that Duke has yet enacted any major changes of policy for off-campus student life in response. Fraternity-sponsored parties remain a chronic disruption in neighborhoods adjacent to Duke’s East Campus.

As KC points out, the first sentence “provides what could charitably be described as an unusual take on the legacy of the lacrosse case” (my emphasis), while the second sentence implies there’s some kind of connection between Duke’s policy for off-campus life and the negative consequences of what they delicately refer to as the “2006 Lacrosse incident.” You know what they were thinking — let’s make Duke think that the lacrosse case was just some off-campus party that went bad and then they’ll clamp down on these kids. After all, “we have young children to raise, jobs to do and classes to teach.” Gimme Gimme Gimme!

It’s something that can only be described as an “unusual linkage” — KC hits the nail on the head, once again. And as usual the syllabus-deviating Trinity Park wannabes responsible for this so-called report haven’t answered his email. The real lessons of the lacrosse case are, as he points out, “no apparent concern of the Trinity Heights Action Committee.” They just want their little “party problem” taken care of, pronto.

It’s clear that KC’s job won’t be done until, at the mere mention of the lacrosse case (or at any invitation to “swagger like us” from an African American student organization), the entire Duke faculty stops, drops, and rolls, chanting in unison, “I will not be taken in by the culture of groupthink or violate the handbook, I will not be taken in by the culture of groupthink or violate the handbook, I will not be taken in by the culture of groupthink or violate the handbook…” There’s just nothing too … peculiar … for these folks. So keep up the good work!

It comes by way of Bill Anderson, based on “a conversation with a prominent Duke faculty member the other day.” According to Anderson this source heard Karla Holloway express a continued belief in the guilt of the three indicted lacrosse players, and she supposedly followed the claim up with some nonsense about “guilt as a social construct.” A long time ago I wrote that criticism flowed in and out of DIW like gossip, but this is ridiculous.

[Update: I’ve just received an email from Karla Holloway. In it, she says that Anderson’s claim is “an absolute and patent falsehood,” that he’s “reporting a conversation that could never have taken place” and that it “misrepresents [her] views.”]

It isn’t the first time that Anderson has claimed to be privy to the inside scoop on Holloway, either. He floated a rumor a couple of years ago (more recently, I’m sorry to say, he slipped it into my blog, too) that she “fixed” a sexual assault charge against a colleague. The two rumors are quite a combo—they make Holloway out to be an ultra dogmatic leftist feminist who’s also an utter hypocrite. Stranger things have happened, so I won’t claim it’s impossible. I don’t find either the new or the old claim to be credible. Even if I did, I can’t imagine why anyone in their right mind would circulate such a story as hearsay.

I’ve had some long go-rounds with Bill Anderson. He can seem like a reasonably intelligent, thoughtful, and even gracious person at times. He’s also capable of passing wild judgments on the people he sees as ideological enemies, and of convincing himself that they’ve thought or said things that he’s in no position to know. The most jaw-dropping example I know of is a wild post on the Liestoppers forum last July, asserting, based on his understanding of the way those kind of people think, that local African American leaders had a supremely callous attitude towards the murder of Eve Carson.

Let us be honest here. There is a portion of Durham—and that includes Irving Joyner—that has an underlying approval for what was done to Eve Carson. I am not saying that Joyner approved of her murder, but he has said nothing that goes to the heart of the situation. He sees himself as a guardian of African-Americans in Durham, and I would not be surprised if he was hoping for an act of jury nullification so Atwater and Lovette could be set free.

Let us not forget that Joyner, McSurely, and the NAACP held that the biggest threat to Durham was the Duke lacrosse team. They desperately wanted these young men railroaded to prison, and in their minds, if Lovette and Atwater are acquitted despite the evidence against them, it will be a “fair trade” to the AA community for the lacrosse players not going to prison. Don’t kid yourself; this is how people like Joyner, Barber, and others think.

With respect to the latest claim about Holloway, Anderson assures us that his source “was not exaggerating, and he is an accomplished academic and not given to loose talk.” I don’t find that very reassuring.

ANOTHER UPDATE

There’s an update on KC Johnson’s post that registers the message I got from Karla Holloway. He also left a comment here, proving himself yet again to be a petty demogogue whose answer to any question or criticism is to point at someone else.

He starts the comment with a classic of sleazeball journalism à la O’Reilly—the “invitation” given out to someone whose been trashed, kindly allowing them to explain their side and get trashed some more. Then he takes up two questions I recently posed in a comment on the Duke Chronicle. True to form, he has no real answer to the first one except packages his denial with the non sequitur suggestion that the “Group of 88” did worse things. On the second question, he points to the other guy (formerly the “towering figure”)—it’s his fault.

Q: Did Johnson end our exchange of comments on DIW with a moderator’s veto? A: He doesn’t know He didn’t, “to the best of [his] knowledge,” but never mind that—the Group of 88 hasn’t defended anything they did, and Zimmerman is a public apologist for them.

Q: Why didn’t Johnson engage any critical reflection after Jim Coleman criticized him? A: It was up to Coleman, apparently, to translate the criticism into chapter and verse in DIW or UPI. Since he didn’t “corroborate his claims,” Johnson can do nothing but wonder why on earth would say such things.

Finally, he adds a paragraph about me, the messenger. In the lacrosse case, he says, the DA was trying to “railroad three innocent students at Prof. Zimmerman’s own institution. During the time those students were in harm’s way, Prof. Zimmerman… was silent about their fate, while 88 of his colleagues signed a public statement which… thanked protesters who had presumed the students’ guilt.” A year and a half ago I pointed out his habit of responding to challenges by pulling out that the formulaic indictment of the 88. He’s still at it. In this case it’s pure ad hominem—a lazy and cowardly response that discredits the messenger in order to deflect the message. And it’s especially effective with the thoughtless and bigoted.

Speaking of cowardly, his first order of business in the update on DIW is to pigeonhole me (“Group apologist Robert Zimmerman reports that he has received an email from Karla Holloway….”), but then he doesn’t have the guts to link to my post. It certainly calls for a link, and there’s even some bullshit in his comment here about public service I’m doing by revealing the (fictional) Group’s thinking. It won’t do them any good if they can’t find me.

The comment is down here. [Further comment/clarification from Johnson is here and here. My reply to the last of those sums up this incident of an uncleared comment, as I see it.]

A natural place to look for guidance is “Liberal Education, Then and Now,” by Peter Berkowitz, the featured essay on the site’s “Must Reads” list. It’s a solid and constructive piece, but the lecture that it’s based on had a more accurate title—“John Stuart Mill’s Idea of a University, and Our Own.” The “Then” that Berkowitz contrasts with our degenerate “Now” isn’t a real place and time, it’s an ideal. It may well be that universities used to embody Mill’s ideal much better than they do now, but Berkowitz has nothing to say about that.

Another professor and public intellectual, D. G. Myers, appreciates Johnson’s vote of confidence for the conservative side in the battle of ideas but he’s not optimistic about those “intriguing possibilities” offered by Obama. The issues enumerated in Johnson’s essay are, for Myers, symptoms of a deeper problem—“the loss of the university principle altogether.”

The current principle animating university life in America is the social principle. The contemporary university is a little society, a self-contained and self-governing body of people living together, where one behaves oneself in accord with common rules so as not to disturb or offend any other residents of the community.

Hence collegiality, an irrelevant value in scholarship, becomes a minimum standard for participation in academic society. […]

Since university professors are social beings just like everyone else (ok, maybe not just like everyone else), it’s hard to imagine that this “social principle” wasn’t a factor until the last generation or so. The “principle animating university life” undoubtedly shifts over time, but in the picture Myers paints few things are a matter of degree.

Where the social principle animates the university, collegiality and the concern for other people’s feelings will be minimum standards. The highest standard, then, will be sophistication. […]

Sophistication is a social attainment. It is a class marker. You know the correct names, you use the correct pronunciation, you quote the correct books. You are not guileless and direct, but subtle and (if possible) ironic. Sophistication is the sworn enemy of truth, because truth can be rude and boisterous and may speak with an accent.

It seems to me that he’s eliding two kinds of sophistication. One is the kind that makes for a sophisticate—a person who’s fashionable and in the know. The other is the kind that, in my opinion but apparently not in his, is a hallmark of a lot of outstanding scholarship and criticism—the opposite of rudimentary and simplistic, not the opposite of “rude and boisterous.” I guess Myers is pointing out a recent twist in the long history of people valuing style over substance, a complacent habit that academics, of all people, should be able to resist. But in that department, the failures come from all over the political spectrum.

Before the current crop of social-thinking sophisticates, there was, according to Myers, the “old idea of the university as a common pursuit of truth.” The university has changed quite a bit over the past few generations, for sure. It seems to me that it’s no easy thing to get a fix on its true character and ethos at any given time, but I doubt it was ever much less “self-contained” and “self-governing,” and I doubt that professors in the olden days were a lot more disturbing and offensive (in my experience, plenty of them still have that effect on each other).

Alan Kors gives an evocative account of the “academic world [in the early 1960s] that won the heart of a kid from Jersey City’s hardscrabble Dickinson High School,” but he puts it in perspective with a forthright look at its dark side.

It was virtually impossible for the most qualified black applicants to gain admission to Princeton; there were exceptions, but they were few indeed. There was widespread, crude racial bigotry among students; there was contempt for the women imported into Princeton on weekends, with a sharp division made between those gentlewomen one might marry and those coeds to whom anything might be promised for favors (“Sweet Briar to wed; Trenton to bed” was one of the politer formulations); there was a vulgar, sadistically cruel, and, indeed, violent hatred of homosexuals there, with exceptions occasionally made for reasons of social class. There was an anti-intellectualism in the student body that astonished me, a lack of interest in all but the most famous speakers or performers, and—the terms truly were used—a contempt by those pleased by “gentlemen’s Cs” for those “grinds” who studied long hours or with enthusiasm. There was a social snobbery more reminiscent now of the 1920s than of anything more recent, and an emphasis on “seeming” over “being” that would have confirmed Rousseau for his later admirers. My freshman year was Princeton’s final year of mandatory chapel (of one’s choice, at least)—a requirement I found deeply intrusive, although they’d advertised it fairly enough—but if exposure to spirituality were meant in any way to replace coarseness with kindness and decency, mandatory chapel was without value. That Princeton also was a place of undergraduate political intolerance. In my junior year, the rooms of two quite thoughtful, warm, bright, and intellectual Marxist seniors were broken into, their “Little Lenin Library” ripped to shreds, and the sole copies of their applications to graduate schools ruined by bottles of ink. The perpetrators turned out to be some of the “biggest men” on campus, and they all were let off with barely a slap on the wrist. That was no golden age, and honest souls across the political spectrum never will talk realistically about the tragedy of higher education today without acknowledging that moral and historical reality.

That’s mostly a description of the students of the day, presented in contrast to the more cerebral faculty. But on the whole the two groups shared the same social values and prejudices, and the student body acted as a kind of buffer zone between the faculty and society at large. A “common pursuit of truth” was a lot easier when the academic world was smaller and more homogeneous. Factoring that in is the way to “acknowledg[e] that moral and historical reality” if you want to compare higher education then and now and keep it real. Otherwise the declensionist narrative is a way of tacitly pining for homogeneity, and for the rigid, irrational hierarchies that produced it.

[Myers responded to this post about a month after it went up, or at least he referred to it as an accusation that he was “pushing aside history and yearning for a Golden Age that never existed.” I guess my post was useful as a way for him to document the weight of misunderstanding that he suffers as he bucks the ill winds of change. He doesn’t bother to respond to the substance of my criticism, which is a shame—that might have been interesting. Instead he repeats the story line about a university that’s “transforming itself” from one thing to another (which means that he’s not just talking about “the idea of the university,” as he claims), and complains bitterly but impotently about how it’s become the wrong thing (and though he writes about transformation at one point, when he gets down to it there seems to be no middle ground).]

I’m not thinking about the ignorant ranters who are ready with a knee-jerk response on most any political topic. I’m thinking about people who work in or around academia, especially those who are inclined to translate their dissatisfaction into a program for reform, though a lot of the time the difference between these more informed critics and the random ranters is not all that clear. My theory is that what the reform movement stands for is more subtle and a lot less compelling than what it stands against—a litany of outrageous incidents involving scary, muddle-headed tenured radicals and the craven administrators who do their dirty work. Without the radicals to generate fear and loathing, the movement has little claim to public attention. The point man in pressing the lacrosse case into service for the cause is KC Johnson, but his crusade is larger than that one scandal and, as I’ve pointed out in the last two entries, he’s just as nonsensical and unprincipled when he’s pursuing other targets.

About a month ago the web site Minding the Campus ran an essay of his, “Obama And The Campus Left.” It’s a post-election look at the “intriguing possibilities” for “meaningful reform on the nation’s college campuses” under the new administration. It overlaps quite a bit with pieces of his that I’ve already written more than enough about. All I’m interested in this time is what the essay reveals about the reform movement.

Minding the Campus is brought to you by the Manhattan Institute. Where there’s an Institute, there’s an agenda, or better yet, many agendas, each with a Center devoted to it. The Center for the American University, for instance, which seeks to promote “diversity of thought” (aka “intellectual pluralism”) in higher education. One prong of their effort is the Veritas Fund, which is supposed to bolster “Western Civ” in university curricula. Minding the Campus is another prong, intended to “foster a new climate of opinion that favors civil and honest engagement of all sides, offering an engaged debate for readers concerned with the state of the modern university.” Or so they say. My assumption is that high-minded statements of purpose like that one are more or less disingenuous until proven otherwise. In this case the assumption is borne out by the content, which isn’t to say that the whole thing is a sham—on the scale of partisan web sites, it’s got some pretty respectable stuff. But there’s a paragraph of Johnson’s essay that gives a truer picture of the site’s premises and priorities.

I’m a Democrat who donated to Obama’s campaign in both the primary and general election. But only the most closed-minded ideologue would deny that conservatives have dominated the recent battle of ideas in higher education. No politician can publicly defend the current situation of professors operating in a groupthink atmosphere, to the detriment of the students they teach. While liberals have mostly ignored the problem, conservatives have helped expose the alarming decline in intellectual pluralism on today’s college campuses. They’ve also fought to uphold free speech on campus, advocated restoring merit and quality as the basic instruments for academic evaluation, and challenged the idea that diversity should form the preeminent goal in university personnel or admissions processes.

The sentence I highlighted stands out for its parochial bluster and for the battle metaphor, which I can’t help but read ironically. I guess we’re supposed to conclude that conservatives are winning the battle because they have better ideas, or maybe because they’re more persuasive. In a commentary from a few years ago arguing against “intellectual diversity,” Stanley Fish uses the same metaphor, but he identifies the war, as well (his mystification about a conventional horticultural metaphor is odd, though). Deciding “who won (or is winning) the culture wars in the academy… depends on what you mean by winning.” “The left may have won the curricular battle, but the right won the public-relations war.”

[I]f the palm is to be awarded to the party that persuaded the American public to adopt its characterization of the academy, the right wins hands down, for it is now generally believed that our colleges and universities are hotbeds (what is a “hotbed” anyway?) of radicalism and pedagogical irresponsibility where dollars are wasted, nonsense is propagated, students are indoctrinated, religion is disrespected, and patriotism is scorned.

Of the points on Johnson’s list of winning ideas, the one about free speech is the strongest. From what I’ve seen, the conservative challenge to speech codes has been reasonably principled, able to differentiate between the authoritarian manifestations of the Left’s ideology and the ideology itself. It takes an oversimplifying spin to make some of the other ideas sound like winners. Contrary to the implications, “merit and quality” are still “basic instruments for academic evaluation,” and diversity is not “the preeminent goal in university personnel or admissions processes.” To the extent that diversity is factored into those decisions, it complicates the process and arguably compromises the purely academic and intellectual standards that should drive it. It’s not an all-or-nothing tradeoff, and there shouldn’t be any need to short-circuit the argument by pretending it is if the case against diversity initiatives is so strong.

Neither “conservatives” nor “liberals” are of one mind about these issues (and I hope everyone is keeping in mind that an analysis reduced to these two broad categories is pretty crude). The conservative side is of two minds about one of them, in particular. They have generally challenged diversity initiatives, but not the one that’s designed to benefit conservatives—“intellectual diversity”—which some of them are busy promoting (“intellectual diversity” and “intellectual pluralism” are interchangeable terms, as far as I can tell). Maybe Fish is wrong and this is a kind of diversity that’s uniquely appropriate to the academy. But for David Horowitz, the lead promoter, it’s a matter of “[using] the language that the left has deployed so effectively in behalf of its own agendas.” To the extent he’s co-opting the idea as well as the language, then it’s a liberal idea that’s winning. If he’s just lifting the language to sell a fundamentally different idea, then he’s working in public relations.

I’ve collected plenty of reservations and gripes as a teacher, about all the priorities of institutions of higher education that have little to do with education, for instance, and about the lightweight and diffuse feeling of a lot of the curriculum. I can only imagine one of the four courses I’ve taught at Duke being offered at Reed College, back in my day (I like to think things there haven’t changed that much). The rest of my courses have been a little too fluffy. It’d be nice to have the opportunity to teach a more rigorous class now and then, but the fluffy classes have had their own charms, so I can’t complain. Naturally I’ve been aware for a long time of the conservative rhetoric about liberal bias in academia. Mostly I’ve dismissed it as a lot of noise. Not that I doubted that I was surrounded by liberals and those to their left—that’s obvious—but it wasn’t until the lacrosse case came along that I saw any reason to worry about it. The conservative reformists got my attention as a group that could potentially hold the campus orthodoxy that I’d been complacent about to a higher standard, and at the same time as a group with a completely uncritical attitude towards an intellectually disgraceful analysis that flattered their worldview.

My trail into and around this battle of ideas is recorded here in my blog. The lacrosse case led me to Durham-in-Wonderland (DIW), which led me to FIRE and then to Alan Kors and the “sadness of higher education.” Where Kors was sad, Edward Glick was just whiny. A month or so ago I wrote about the Veritas fund’s foothold at Cornell and also summed up my impressions of “intellectual diversity.” I’ve read lots of other stuff here and there, but it still adds up to an idiosyncratic sample that doesn’t come close to covering all the angles. I think I’ve gotten a pretty good sense of how the battle is typically being fought, though.

Once upon a comment thread, Michael Bérubé suggested a shorthand for the routine critique of liberal bias—“Larry Summers and Duke lacrosse team Ward Churchill.” For conservatives, those three scandals are the sickness at the heart of academia made concrete. Concentrating on the extremists who are assumed to be commonplace in this Wonderland makes for easy and formulaic criticism. It’s fine for everyday grumbling but it seems like professors trying to make a serious point would aim higher. It was an odd experience when my post on Alan Kors was cast as the “contemptuous dismissal” of the “academic establishment,” if not the ranting of a “hard core, uninformed crank[]”—whatever its flaws, what I wrote is careful, detailed, and deeply ambivalent. The extremist fixation is death to perspective, which suits the anti-intellectual set just fine—perspective tends to drain outrage, which is a great source of energy and invective for them. It’s also how you tell the difference between mountains and molehills and all the things in between, and it’s a hallmark of meaningful, intelligent criticism.

If “Duke Lacrosse hoax” and “Ward Churchill” and “Bill Ayers” stand for pretense, prejudice, and witless groupthink, a critic disgusted with the situation ought to stand for something else. Writing broad-minded, well-reasoned, and undogmatic criticism would be a great way to do that, but conservatives assume, with some justification, that they’re in the minority and embattled, and apparently it’s a situation that calls for something more forceful. At times it seems like there’s a balancing reaction at work that’s almost Newtonian—bias answered by an equal and opposite counter-bias. Other times the assumption at work seems to be that careful consideration of the ideas of a commonplace campus radical would inevitably give them too much credit and insult the intelligence of decent, sensible readers. Staking a rhetorical claim to the intellectual high ground, to open-minded, rational examination of hard facts, for example, is a lot more motivating than an actual rational examination of hard facts, especially one that attempts to put the outrageous evidence in perspective. Alan Kors is generally more careful and thoughtful than other conservative critics I’ve read, but when he gets down to partisan business he treats the other side as an intellectual non-entity, and the result is melodramatic and uninsightful criticism. The less thoughtful writers come across as lightweights and demagogues. This is a problem for a community dedicated to the proposition that a healthy academy needs more people like themselves—the cure looks a lot like the disease, if not worse.

Intellectual diversity is overtly a matter of balance—one excess balancing out another, according to the Manhattan Institute’s David DeRosiers: “[t]he idea behind what we’re doing is to bring back triumphalism to moderate the excesses of gender and [diversity courses].” He was quoted in the context of the Institute’s debut at Cornell, but I think the comment applies more generally. It’s much more representative of the thinking behind Minding the Campus than the inspiring epigraph from Allan Bloom on their “About Us” page.

The liberally educated person is one who is able to resist the easy and preferred answers, not because he is obstinate but because he knows others worthy of consideration.

That would look great chiseled in marble, wouldn’t it? It’s pure PR, though—I don’t see any signs on the site of special resistance to easy and preferred answers, or, for that matter, much evidence of minds deeply touched by “intellectual pluralism and the best traditions of liberal education.” The project, really, is to promulgate the r/Right set of easy and preferred answers, perhaps in order to strike a balance with the other side’s easy and preferred answers. If that’s what they have in mind, though, relativism must be another liberal idea that’s winning.

It’s a matter of faith in most of these conservative critiques that once upon a time, things were better, so reform is really a matter of revival. More on that in the next post.