If you google obama ayers khalidi, what comes up is mostly the ranting of people already certain about who to be more afraid of. It was in the interest of the Republican side to make the most of the two professors’ radicalism and their ties to Obama, and anyway, radical professors are a favorite specter of the Right. The academic world’s reflex to circle the wagons and shout “McCarthyism” is represented by the fulsome petition at supportbillayers.org, and the list of over 4000 names under it. But not all Obama supporters were sympathetic to Ayers and Khalidi, and the first line of defense from his camp was to downplay the connection.

I noticed one person conspicuously trying to play on both sides of the fence, to make the most of the radicalism but downplay the connection—KC Johnson. Inside Higher Ed tags him as someone who’s “frequently criticized academe for a lack of political diversity” when he’s dragged in for balance in an otherwise soft-headed article “In Defense of Ayers”. In fact he approached the controversy about Obama’s radical pals the same way he’s approached the Duke lacrosse case, not as a critic but as a crusader rooting out the extremists of the academic Left. As I’ve pointed out ad nauseum about his lacrosse-case stuff, his crusading mentality reduces people and issues to cartoonish black-and-white, and his reasoning, evidence, and rhetoric are all compromised. His defense of Obama shows how in the grip of it he is, because it’s not really a defense, it’s an attempt to capitalize on the controversy in order to promote the academic culture war as a Democratic party agenda.

Inside Higher Ed picked up Johnson’s take on the controversy from a post on Cliopatria, a group blog on the History News Network. I imagine that one reason the blog exists is to give academic historians a place to editorialize, but it’s a shame to see it used as a soapbox for misrepresentation and simple-minded polemics—my opinion hasn’t changed in the months since my testy exchange with Ralph Luker, the chief blogger over there. A premise of the site is that “history is complicated,” and behind this controversy are the complicated histories of several complicated people. Ayers went from being a fugitive militant radical to being a key player in Chicago school reform, apparently acceptable in that context to establishment figures from both parties. Khalidi was attractive to the International Republican Institute (chaired by John McCain) in the mid-90s because of his “coolness to the PLO” but a decade or so earlier was apparently, despite his denials, speaking for the PLO (I like this post by Ron Kampeas, Washington bureau chief for the Jewish news organization JTA, grappling with the ambiguity after being forced to back down from defending Khalidi against the PLO-spokesman charge). Johnson wants the two as poster boys for academic extremism—not exceptional but typical—so it served his purpose to leave intact the simplistic and superficial impressions that were already in circulation and contribute a little spin of his own to the caricature of Khalidi. All in all it does nothing for Obama but it’s a nice little gift to the Republican operative Johnson quotes who wants Obama to “own his friendships with individuals that are in some cases anti-American, anti-Semitic and pro-terrorist.”

A couple of days after it went up on Cliopatria, Johnson posted a modified version of the commentary on his lacrosse-case blog, Durham-in-Wonderland (DIW), and the rhetoric and agenda-driven reasoning are ramped up somewhat in the process. The same thing happens with another KC Johnson polemic that initially went up on Cliopatria, this one about a couple of Brooklyn College professors who’ve been petitioning on behalf of Syed Fahad Hashmi, a former student detained on terrorism charges. In that one, the crusading logic is even more obviously in the drivers seat, especially in the rewrite, which panders to DIW loyalists with cheap rhetoric that Johnson couldn’t get away with on Cliopatria (I hope). The funniest part is a line about statements made by Hashmi’s supporters that “read as if cribbed from a defense brief.” Has anyone covering a legal controversy ever written more “analysis” that sounds like a defense brief than Johnson?

[For more on the Hashmi case, read the next post. There’s a response to this paragraph from KC Johnson in the comments.]

The tribalism runs deep in DIW. Wherever you look over there, including at the legal teams and their arguments, one side seems to have cornered the market on whatever’s honest, decent, sensible, and worthwhile. Mike Nifong’s efforts were pathetic and dishonest enough that an unbalanced impression of the criminal investigation is probably unavoidable. But Johnson’s treatment of the ongoing lawsuits has the same cheerleading slant. The way he describes “The Duke Motion to Dismiss”, it’s cynical legal maneuvering, or else “(scarcely credible) p.r. spin” straight out of Creative Writing 101. The “powerful response” from the plaintiff’s attorney, on the other hand, is beyond reproach or even criticism—no legal maneuvering there. It may be that Duke’s position is so weak that it can’t do anything but grasp at straws. But it’s hard to believe that such a lopsided characterization is the result of serious analysis. I haven’t tried to size up the lawsuits, but on one point I happened to look up, both sets of plaintiffs offer pure spin.

Though it’s toned down, Johnson brings the same attitude to his support for Obama. During the primaries a major focus of his Cliopatria posts was the disingenuous and muddle-headed nature of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Among the variations on the theme, “Clinton’s Rhetoric and Reality” has her making absurd claims of sexism in her concession speech, “Clinton’s Constitutional Conundrum” has her pandering to Guam and Puerto Rico, and “The Clinton Dozen” details the “latest in [her] campaign’s effort to play the race card.” And then there’s the other Clinton, who, in “Bill Channels Wilentz,” “[advances the] bizarre thesis that Obama, not the Clintons, played the race card in the nominating process.” I expect that a lot of the criticism is fairly well founded, and it often comes with interesting historical tie-ins. But like the DIW account of the lacrosse lawsuits, the overall impression is that only one side is playing politics.

Johnson is very good at framing a controversy or dispute so that he can efficiently sort the good/right/true from the bad/wrong/false and play them off against each other, or just dwell on the bad, which is more typical. Things can get ugly if the frames overlap, though. A bad joke that a mutual reader tried to post to DIW shows how ugly: “just to rib [Johnson], I wrote ‘Can’t we all get along?’ and suggested that perhaps he and Crystal [Mangum (the accuser in the lacrosse case)] should get together to co-host a rally for Obama.” Plenty of crude humor makes it through Johnson’s “lightest of touch” comment moderation, but this time, somehow, it didn’t.

In his analysis of “Obama and the Khalidi/Ayers Attacks,” Johnson tries to play in both the culture-war and campaign frames and finesse the clash. It seems to have been an opportunity that was too good to pass up. His argument, in a nutshell, is that Ayers and Khalidi are so unexceptional and integrated in the “groupthink academic environment” that Obama couldn’t be expected to avoid them. In other words, the depth of the problem turns out, somehow, to be his candidate’s excuse. Oh, and by the way, the Democratic party better get with the program, because it was their “poor record in promoting diversity of thought and pedagogical approach on the nation’s college campuses” that made Obama vulnerable in the first place. Talk about having your cake and eating it too!

On DIW it’s “The Lacrosse Case & the Khalidi/Ayers Controversy.” Here’s Johnson letting Obama off the hook—text removed from the Cliopatria post is overstruck, text added for DIW is bracketed.

For the GOP attack to work, Ayers and Khalidi have to be viewed as exceptional figures[—wholly unlike nearly all other professors]. Obama’s judgment can hardly be questioned if his “buddies” were not marginal characters but instead people who are like [resemble] lots of other academics, especially since Obama lived in an academic neighborhood (Hyde Park) and spent several years teaching at the University of Chicago Law School.

Yet the truth of the matter is that the basic [pedagogical and academic] approaches of Ayers and Khalidi fit well within the academic mainstream. Ayers is, after all, a prestigious professor of education (hardly a field known for its intellectual diversity, of course [as I have explored elsewhere]). Khalidi was of such standing that Columbia hired him away from the U of C, and named him to chair its Middle East Studies Department. From that perch, [he presided over a wildly biased anti-Israel curriculum, even as] he informed readers of New York that students of Arab descent—and only such students—knew the “truth” about Middle Eastern affairs.

I lived in Hyde Park for six years, and I can’t tell you how many of my friends turned out to be unrepentant terrorists. Or, well, maybe I could… but I don’t have any political ambitions, so never mind. The DIW commentariat was no more more impressed than I am by Johnson’s clumsy sleight-of-hand, which insults not only the reader’s intelligence but the candidate’s as well. It would be understandable if it took a while before Obama realized that the Education professor putting together that big grant was once wanted for planting bombs in federal buildings—even in academia, believe it or not, that’s a singular bio. But Khalidi’s involvement with the Palestinian cause was ongoing and obvious, and over time it was the basis for conversations that included, by Obama’s account, “consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases.”

My impression is that Johnson’s fans mostly brushed the lame excuse aside. Rantburg sums up the real message of the post:

Prof. Johnson is certainly correct about the American academy: once you venture away from the hard sciences, you encounter a world in which people like William Ayers, Rashid Khalidi, Ward Churchill and others like them are not just ordinary and common-place, but both accepted and powerful.

David Thompson thumps the same drum but at least has a little more imagination in conjuring up outrageous academic villains—after all, his banner promises comic books, and what could be more entertaining than vanquishing “far left fantasists” intent on “‘groom[ing]’ youngsters with the ‘correct’ political outlook”? (it’s a lot more fun than the actual research, that’s for sure).

The bone Johnson throws to DIW readers in the passage I quoted is the comment about Columbia’s “wildly biased anti-Israel curriculum.” Elsewhere, the revised version is sprinkled with references to Duke’s all-purpose band of extremist stick figures, the so-called “Group of 88.” Khalidi is, in Johnson’s account, not only overvalued and hostile to America’s true friend in the Middle East but also ready to pass dismissive and self-serving judgment on the students he’s supposed to be teaching. If that sounds a lot like the “Group” profile, well, lo and behold, a few paragraphs later Johnson reads his tea leaves and declares that “[i]f Khalidi or Ayres were employed at Duke, doubtless they would have joined the Group of 88.”

Johnson doesn’t give a link to that New York magazine article, but when I tracked it down I found that Khalidi’s comments are not nearly so clear-cut. True to form, Johnson whittled them down to just the bullshit that suits his agenda.

“Most kids who come to Columbia come from environments where almost everything they’ve ever thought was shared by everybody around them,” [Khalidi] says. “And this is not true, incidentally, of Arab-Americans, who know that the ideas spouted by the major newspapers, television stations, and politicians are completely at odds with everything they know to be true. Whereas kids from, I don’t know, Teaneck. Or Scarsdale. Or Levittown. Or Long Island City. Many of them have never been exposed to a dissonant idea, a different idea, as far as the Middle East is concerned. And so you have a situation where it’s going to be problematic.”

Whatever this is, it’s absolutely not a blanket claim that one group owns the “truth” and the other doesn’t. The essence of it is that one has experienced more dissonance than the other, which doesn’t seem like such a controversial claim. Are the Jewish-American kids who go to Columbia more likely than the Arab-Americans to come from a relatively homogeneous community in which they’re well integrated? I believe they are. And are the students of Arab extraction more likely than the Jewish ones to encounter views on the Middle East that clash with their own views? Yes—public and political opinion in the US is overwhelmingly pro-Israel. Now just because Khalidi’s basic claim is plausible doesn’t mean it’s right, and even if it is right the differences between the groups might not be as stark or as significant, in practice, as Khalidi seems to think—that’s where my skepticism really kicks in. But there are all sorts of ways to object to this passage without misrepresenting it.

The article is about the controversy over the classroom behavior of professors in Columbia’s Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures (MEALAC). It’s well worth reading—the reporter, Jennifer Senior, gives a good account of both sides. Khalidi is quoted extensively. He’s “passionately invested in the future of Mideast studies,” and therefore on the defensive, since he sees the charges against his department as a “huge club” that’s being used to attack the field as a whole. But he doesn’t dismiss the charges, which date from when he was still in Hyde Park palling around with Obama.

“You know,” he concludes, “it could be the case that there are students who have serious grievances and it’s the case that threats to our academic freedom have developed over the last two years. This is a situation where you have to assume it’s possible to walk and chew gum at the same time.”

Johnson’s analysis of “Obama and the Khalidi/Ayers Attacks” was a daredevil attempt to walk and chew gum at the same time. He failed miserably—not a surprise, since his heart wasn’t really in it in the first place. His talents run in the opposite direction, towards mind-numbing moralistic either/ors, and in that department the differences between him and Sarah Palin are mostly a matter of vocabulary and accent.

This entry is all about problems with DIW. Look at the previous one for a broader and at least somewhat more balanced look at bullshit and the lacrosse case. A lot of what’s on the list below is covered in earlier posts—you can get more detail by following the links.

The most glaring misrepresentation I’ve found is a quote from Mark Anthony Neal that’s presented as his description of a recurring experience at Duke—it comes from an article he wrote a year before he joined the Duke faculty. A blatantly out-of-context quote from Donna Lisker shows Johnson reading like a drug-sniffing dog, hypersensitive to passages that can be made to sound extremist or intolerant or, in this case, biased against the lacrosse players. Then there are samples of the more sustained reduction to type that’s inflicted on Karla Holloway and Wahneema Lubiano. Johnson’s treatment of two events involving President Brodhead shows him using the limitations of his evidence as an opportunity to make stuff up. His story of an angry backlash against Steven Baldwin shows how little evidence it takes to convince him that the PC crowd at Duke is just as predictable as he thought. And when it looks like a Duke-run website is trying to expunge the memory of the three indicted lacrosse players, he mines the historically-charged metaphor of airbrushing for all it’s worth, and then some. First off, though, is something that’s not the usual typecasting but instead a bullshit insinuation that makes the “Group” look as loathsome as possible.

1. If you can call them the same name, they’re the same thing: The Pressler “protesters.”

   [Duke lacrosse coach Mike] Pressler and his family were subjected to death threats. Protesters taped signs to his house with such messages as “DO YOUR DUTY. TURN THEM IN.” Several days later, when the Group of 88 issued their “listening” statement, the professors offered a message for such protesters: Thank you for not waiting and for making yourselves heard. [“Scapegoating,” DIW, August 4, 2006]

   When I highlighted this passage as an egregious example of Johnson capitalizing on ignorance instead of fighting it, he responded that he’d “never claimed that the Group in any way thanked people who attacked Mike Pressler or who demanded his dismissal.” That’s so true. Like any good insinuation, the claim is in the eye of the beholder—it depends on who counts as “such protesters.” The protests that Johnson explicitly ties to the “listening” statement didn’t involve death threats or notes taped furtively to houses while a family was sleeping inside, so the connection isn’t that specific. The spirit of vigilantism behind the harassment of Pressler has clear parallels in the potbanging protest, which included a grotesque call for violence, and also in the “wanted” posters that went up on campus. But Johnson makes no linkage and offers no explanation or analysis, so the passage boils down to open-ended insinuation and literalistic sophistry—the people harassing Pressler are “protesters,” the “listening” statement thanks “protesters,” Q.E.D.

2. Outrageous stories about outrageous people are probably true and definitely useful: Mark Anthony Neal and the outer limits of credibility.

   The myth that Neal lives by informs his claim that whenever he “rolls into the classroom on the first day of class,” there is always somebody “in the house quietly utter[ing] ‘who’s the nigger?’” That a professor heard students whispering the N-word at politically correct Duke approaches the outer limits of credibility. [“The Group’s Intellectual Origins,” DIW, March 10, 2007]

   This is supposed to be Neal’s bullshit, but it’s actually Richard Bertrand Spencer’s. Neal wasn’t writing about “whenever,” and he wasn’t writing about anything he heard at Duke, either—the basis for Spencer’s story is an article that came out more than a year before Neal started teaching there.

   Spencer’s tall tale, published with no citation, was a test that Johnson’s bullshit detector failed miserably. The DIW commentariat did no better, as far as I can tell. But when Spencer’s article came out, Johnson had already put Neal’s other outrageous utterances to work in an effortless and highly effective character prosecution. What Johnson shows in the end is that, when rhetorical push comes to shove, he has far more of a taste for thuggery than Neal.

3. If you can put it between quotes, you can pass it off as what they said: Making an example of Donna Lisker.

   The only other Duke author on the [university’s “Duke and Men’s Lacrosse” media coverage homepage] is Donna Lisker, head of the Duke women’s center. Lisker’s column appeared in a publication called “Baldwin Scholars Newsletter.” Unlike the 31 other opinion pieces featured on both the media coverage homepage and the section of archived articles, this publication has no website. Duke evidently considered Lisker’s message of sufficient importance to upload the article onto the University website itself. Among other things, Lisker faulted a Rolling Stone article on campus social life for speaking only to students who “believed staunchly in the innocence of the accused men.” [“The Brodhead Files,”, DIW, August 1, 2006]

   Johnson’s point, looking at the links to lacrosse-case coverage on Duke’s website, is that the official line was that “it’s OK to be one-sided in speaking solely to campus critics of the lacrosse team.” He sniffed out as “evidence” one phrase in Lisker’s article, and it’s most definitely “among other things.” What she faults the Rolling Stone for is “seeking interview subjects who would declare their opinion in absolutes.” Whether she would have faulted the magazine just as much if all four subjects had believed that the players were guilty instead of innocent, I can’t say, and neither can Johnson. But her focus isn’t the Rolling Stone article (“Sex and Scandal at Duke”), it’s the women who were Baldwin Scholars during the Spring 2006 semester. She is just as respectful of the two lacrosse players who “appeared in an NBC piece about the success of the women’s team and the difficulty they had watching their male counterparts go through this ordeal” as she is of the African American who was on Nightline addressing “the racial aspects of the situation” (One of the two lacrosse players, Rachel Stack, wrote a September 2006 Chronicle op-ed that Johnson turned into useful fodder). Lisker’s main point is about what they represented as a group:

   What was remarkable about this diversity of responses is that they all coexisted peacefully. The Baldwin Scholars gave one another the gift of respectful and constructive disagreement. What’s more, they did not let this highly polarizing experience split them by race, by sorority affiliation, or by social class. They recognized that in a situation this complicated, there would be multiple truths, and they tried to see one another’s perspectives. In so doing, they were far ahead of most of the media professionals roaming campus throughout March and April. I spoke often of the Baldwin Scholars to the many reporters who interviewed me this spring; I wanted them to know about these remarkable young women leaders who were asking good questions and refusing to reduce the situation to its lowest common denominator. I thought they might learn something from them.

   It sounds like Johnson could have learned a lot from them, as well, and also from Lisker—her piece is a much more genuine critique of one-sided coverage than his post is. Instead, in a remarkable show of bad faith, he took nine of Lisker’s words and turned them into bullshit, then put them in quotation marks so she’d take the blame.

4. Everyone knows how feminist extremists think, so there’s no need to puzzle out the convoluted nonsense that they write (part 1): Karla Holloway socks it to the jocks.

   1.) The courts will not reach the desired outcome to advance her on-campus aims, and so their results must be preemptively dismissed. […]
   
   2.) The culture of male athletics is inherently immoral. […]
   
   3.) Women athletes are effectively traitors to their gender. […]
   
   4.) The “victim” in this affair is… Karla Holloway. [“The Travails of Karla Holloway,” DIW, September 20, 2006]

   I don’t know of a DIW entry that’s more full of it than this critique of an article Holloway published in an online academic journal in the summer of 2006. Just about every point he makes is fudged in one way or another, including the four section headings quoted above.

   The last three headings say little about Holloway and much more about the one-dimensional stereotype of a shrill race-obsessed feminist that represents her in Wonderland. Johnson seems to think that the real message of the article is whatever a person like that would want to say—what the text provides is hints and incriminating quotes. Her distaste for certain aspects of the culture of men’s sports and her misgivings about the way the women’s lacrosse players expressed their faith in the innocence of the three indicted men are both translated by Johnson into outright condemnation. And though I don’t blame anyone for feeling that Holloway makes too much of the scandal as a personal imposition, she never comes close to setting herself up as the victim. This is a cheap shot that Johnson tends to take whenever it looks like the wrong kind of person is complaining about how the scandal has impacted them—besides Holloway, there’s Robyn Wiegman, Wahneema Lubiano, and Michael Hardt, Cathy Davidson (“and her 87 colleagues”), “the Group” again (and again), and the Durham Police Department, and perhaps others as well.

   As far as dismissing the legal outcome, Johnson never explains why Holloway would have to when her “on-campus aims” have to do with “aspects of [the team’s] conduct that extend into the social realms of character and integrity [and] should not be the parameters of adjudicatory processes.” He ignores the straightforward distinction between what can and what can’t be settled by a criminal court again when he turns to her pithy claim that “White innocence means black guilt. Men’s innocence means women’s guilt.” In Holloway’s article it’s a thoroughly debatable opinion about her experience of how the allegations had been understood and discussed. It’s Johnson who turns it into absurd bullshit about what the court should decide.

5. Everyone knows how feminist extremists think, so there’s no need to puzzle out the convoluted nonsense that they write (part 2): Wahneema Lubiano, perfect offender.

   In turn, she has used [her tenured position at Duke] to rally opposition to her own institution’s students, the “perfect offenders” whose conviction she believes will advance her pedagogical and ideological agenda. [“Creating Wahneema’s World,” DIW, December 12, 2006]

   Johnson seems to have left no stone unturned in an effort to portray Lubiano as the epitome of the extremist race/class/gender mindset—the kind of person who has compromised the quality of college faculties in general and turned Duke into an academic Wonderland. One item in the fat dossier Johnson compiled on her is a list of almost a dozen statements, positions and associations that’s supposed to represent her ideological extremism. Some of it is activism meant to have a political or institutional impact, such as “demand[ing] that Duke divest from companies doing business in Israel” and supporting a graduate student union at NYU—fair game as part of a critical look at what she stands for as a person and a professor. Some of it is vague pandering, like the conference with both “Black” and “Queer” in its title. He ends the list on a note of creepy McCarthyism, pointing out that in 2001 she spoke to the Triangle Vegetarian Peace Society—apparently the significance of speaking to such a group is obvious, and it doesn’t matter what she talked about. The list is a pretty good representation of his scattershot criticism of Lubiano, heavy on circumstantial evidence and character prosecution.

   There’s stuff in her dossier that’s directly related to the lacrosse case, of course. Her central role in drafting the “listening” statement is the big thing, and she made other statements that frame the lacrosse incident as a race/class/gender issue. There’s not a shred of direct evidence showing she had any particular stake in lacrosse players being convicted of rape. But it seems that the mass of circumstantial evidence and a relentlessly simplistic model of the black female ideologue adds up to a window into her mind—and it seems to me that Johnson does treat black women as especially agenda-driven and transparent.

   If he’s right about what she believed—I can’t prove he isn’t—then he reads her mind better than he reads her words. He got little out of the article she posted in mid-April 2006 (“Perfect Offenders, Perfect Victim: The Limitations of Spectacularity in the Aftermath of the Lacrosse Team Incident”) other than confirmation that she’s just the kind of extremist he thought she was, and that she hoped to make an example of the “perfect offenders” on the Duke lacrosse team. When I pointed out that she’s analyzing the public debate and not calling anyone anything—something others had already done, including Lubiano herself—he came back with a snide dismissal of her “after-the-fact revisionism” (as opposed to before-the-fact revisionism?):

   Many months after penning these words, Lubiano explained that she was merely analyzing the situation—that she didn’t consider the lacrosse players “perfect offenders,” because, evidently, she couldn’t be considered either a strong defender of the “victim” [sic] or among those who “see the alleged offenders as the exemplars of the upper end of the class hierarchy, the politically dominant race and ethnicity, the dominant gender, the dominant sexuality, and the dominant social group on campus.” …
   
   
   This is, after all, the same Wahneema Lubiano who…

   The list that follows is supposed to show that she couldn’t have been “merely analyzing the situation” in her article—that she was revealing her opinion of the lacrosse team by slapping a label on them. Like the list covering her ideological extremism, it’s a scattershot collection that mostly reflects the rhetorical logic announced by “the same Wahneema Lubiano,” which is prosecutorial rehashing of the defendant’s transgressions, with a lot of prosecutorial spin. Unless he feels she should be condemned for thought crimes (and it doesn’t seem like he has any objection to doing that) the question of whether or not “perfect offenders” is a hypothetical position doesn’t at all hinge on what she believes—analyzing one’s own position objectively is a matter of basic intellectual competence. She wrote the article as an activist addressing fellow activists, so there’s no doubt what side she’s on. But in her analysis she gives a credible account of two opposing positions and of the dynamic that results. Despite her reputation (on DIW, anyway) as jargony and incomprehensible, she’s summarized her analysis quite clearly:

   I make the argument that supporters of the alleged victim needed to see the players as “perfect offenders” to affirm their support for her and that supporters of the players needed to see a “perfect victim” before they could imagine that a crime had even occurred. I was not arguing for myself, I was trying to describe a dynamic that over-simplified every possible element of the discussion.

   What’s funny about this, especially given that Johnson treats Lubiano as a case study in scholarly quality taking a hit for the sake of “diversity,” is that Lubiano gives a perfectly credible performance as a college professor in “Perfect Offenders,” while Johnson, in response, consistently plays the role of a hack. Lubiano’s analysis can stand or fall on its own merits, independent of her sympathies, and her rhetoric is mild and reasonably neutral. On the other hand, after starting with the logic of a kindergartner and tattling on Lubiano for calling the lacrosse players “perfect offenders,” Johnson offers up a lot of disparaging rhetoric and a puffed-up list of circumstantial evidence, with a little agenda-driven analysis mixed in here and there. And Lubiano is the one who represents academia’s declining standards?

6. A hint is as good as a smoking gun when you’re dealing with utterly predictable people: The persecution of Steven Baldwin.

   Baldwin’s missive did arouse the wrath of the righteous. Ignoring any pretense of desiring dialogue and debate with those who dared to challenge their agenda, the Group [of 88] and its sympathizers immediately tried to silence Baldwin. [“Remembering the Good,” DIW, August 9, 2007]

   It’s clear that Baldwin’s op-ed angered a lot of people on campus, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if some of the reaction was intolerant and even threatening. Two things put Johnson’s account of the incident in the realm of bullshit and not serious reporting or even informed speculation. One is the discrepancy between the scorn he pours on Robyn Weigman’s comment about “the language of lynching” and the free pass he gives to the heated rhetoric about tarring and feathering that Baldwin directed at some unspecified colleagues. If Baldwin’s goal was to provide fodder for Johnson’s blog and book he hit just the right note, but if he really wanted to improve the atmosphere for the lacrosse team, more carefully chosen words would have served him better.

   The other problem is that the supposed onslaught of political correctness is documented by exactly two communications—a public response from Robyn Weigman and a private email from Kerrie Haynie. I suppose that Weigman’s letter might count as an effort to silence Baldwin, though I don’t see why it would be taken seriously as such. Haynie’s email is all about Baldwin’s damning rhetoric and not at all about the “Group’s” agenda. And that shouldn’t come as a surprise—Haynie didn’t sign the “listening” statement but he did sit on the committee chaired by Jim Coleman that’s widely credited with salvaging the lacrosse team’s reputation.

   Baldwin must have gotten a lot of angry email—anyone at Duke who made a controversial public statement about the case seems to have gotten a lot of angry email. Much of it might support the narrative about the “wrath of the righteous” that’s so attractive not only to Johnson but to advocates of “intellectual diversity” and unfettered free speech like FIRE. Despite his reputation as a tireless researcher, in this case Johnson’s interest in digging up the facts seems to have faded once he had something in hand that made just the right impression. And what’s enough for him is apparently enough for supposedly “non-partisan” academic reformers at FIRE, as well.

7. It doesn’t matter how good the evidence is, it matters how good it sounds: Brodhead’s “bad enough.”

   Perhaps Brodhead’s single most inexcusable comment during this affair came in an appearance at a Durham Chamber of Commerce meeting on April 20, two days after the indictments of Reade Seligmann and Colin Finnerty. WRAL-TV quoted the president as saying, “If our students did what is alleged, it is appalling to the worst degree. If they didn’t do it, whatever they did is bad enough.” [“Dissembling,” DIW, August 23, 2006]

   Bad enough that what? That at least two of those students deserve to rot in jail? That Duke needs to take a hard look not only at how its students relate to each other and also how they relate to the community? That Duke’s neighbors have been wondering just what standards it holds its athletes to? That Duke and Durham will continue to be scrutinized and caricatured on the evening news? The phrase pattern “it’s bad enough…” isn’t self-sufficient—it calls for some sort of reference or consequence. When it’s left hanging, the rest is probably implied by the context. What’s left out can also be a rhetorical gesture, a way of saying “it’s so bad I can’t put it into words,” or “I might get in trouble if I say it, but you know what a mean” (wink, wink), which seems to be the way Brodhead’s critics hear this one. It’s a conclusion that’s almost entirely in the ear of the beholder. (As I’m posting this, I see that Johnson has recently come up with another alternative: “[the] underage drinking was ‘bad enough’ to merit the national assault on his two students’ character.” Of course! It’s so obvious!)

   There are three short clips of Brodhead speaking in the WRAL story. They have no particular connection to each other except that he’s apparently “venting” about the lacrosse case in all of them (it seems to have been an unscripted panel discussion, though I can’t tell for sure). The clip with “bad enough” is cut before he’s finished speaking the word “enough.” Probably it’s the end of a sentence, but it might not be—there’s no way to tell without unedited video or a transcript, and Johnson confirmed in an email that he didn’t have access to either. Apparently that’s not a bug, it’s a feature, as the geeks like to say—Johnson uses the missing context as an excuse for a few paragraphs of tendentious speculation (aka bullshit). In the end he packages the remark as Brodhead’s “April 20 condemnation of Seligmann and Finnerty.” My impression is that in the scholarly realm, especially in history, such an opportunistic approach to source material would be frowned on, or else laughed at.

   A few weeks ago, attorney Jim Cooney created some buzz by telling a reporter that Brodhead pulled some strings behind the scenes to smooth Reade Seligmann’s way into Brown University. This was hard to swallow for all the folks who were convinced that Brodhead was, at best, utterly indifferent to the indicted lacrosse players. All the more because Cooney used to be one of the guys in white hats. Jason Trumpbour posted his thoughts about all that on the FODU web site. His analysis is cogent and pretty convincing, and on the whole I think he’s come by his cynicism honestly. But this stood out:

   I cannot imagine Brodhead writing anyone on Reade’s behalf without a gun to his head. If he did so, it was either as part of the settlement or for his own self interest.

   That, to me, is mostly a comment about the limitations of Trumpbour’s imagination. I don’t have any trouble imagining Brodhead speaking and acting one way in his public, institutional role and another way in private. More to the point, it left me wondering if the reason Johnson and others are convinced that Brodhead’s “bad enough” was a condemnation of Seligmann and Finnerty is that they just can’t imagine anything else.

   It’s no surprise that both of the lacrosse players’ civil suits against Duke invoke the line. One of them fully embraces the conventional-wisdom bullshit: with the remark, “Brodhead revealed his callous indifference to the truth, suggesting that even if the alleged rape had never occurred, the lacrosse players were getting what they deserved” (Carrington et al v. Duke University et al, p. 142). The other suit is more subtle, calling it “nearly a slogan” (McFadyen et al v. Duke University et al, p. 259), which strikes me as accurate but ironic, since as far as I can see the only people using it like a slogan were the ones attacking Brodhead.

8. Don’t spoil a picture-perfect impression with fastidious attention to the evidence: The president, the thug, and Duke’s “culture of crassness.”

   [I]t’s worth pondering what it says about Brodhead and his administration that the president denounced Duke’s alleged “culture of crassness” while he spoke supportively alongside a professor who describes himself as “thugniggaintellectual” and says he embodies “this figure that comes into intellectual spaces like a thug, who literally is fearful and menacing. [“Intellectual Thuggery,” DIW, August 11, 2006]

   That was the end of the post, a Wonderland moment being shrinkwrapped with a rhetorical flourish—Johnson had already made the rank hypocrisy of the supposed “conversation” perfectly clear, and there was no need for any further “pondering.” For all I know the heavy irony hits its mark, but if so it’s not because accuracy was the goal. The sole basis for Johnson’s account of the forum (other than his imagination) is a short article in the Duke Chronicle, and it never places Brodhead “supportively alongside” anyone else and gives no indication that he mentioned, much less denounced, the “culture of crassness.”

   According to the Chronicle, that theme belonged to the Dean of Students, Sue Wasiolek, who “cited comments written by students on blogs, including one student’s comment that Duke was leaning towards a ‘culture of crassness,’ which adversely affected the intellectual atmosphere of the University.” But apparently it’s not enough for Johnson that the topic came up and was treated seriously—he wants to be able to pin the juxtaposition of Neal and the “culture of crassness” on Brodhead, and that’s easiest if the theme was planned into the event. So what was worth pondering in August was, in October, “worth remembering”:

   that Neal is the professor—of the nearly 500 members of Duke’s arts and sciences faculty—with whom Richard Brodhead chose to share the stage at an event to combat the university’s alleged “culture of crassness” following Nifong’s first two arrests.

   In an email to me about a year after that, Johnson said outright that the event was “designed to combat the ‘culture of crassness’ on campus” (emphasis added). That’s hard to square with the public record. There’s nothing about crassness in this announcement for the event, and if there was it would have been quite a surprise to Preeti Aroon, the Duke graduate student who coined the phrase in a column that ran in the Chronicle the day before the “Conversation.” Half a year later, she wrote that she was “intrigued at how quickly a term I created in my little apartment in Durham spread like a virus and made it into a national news magazine (Newsweek) within two weeks.”

9. For dramatic effect, nothing beats a trip behind the iron curtain: The epic two-day-long struggle of memory against forgetting on GoDuke.com.

   But, very much like that photograph of Gottwald from the March 1948 rally, Duke has airbrushed from history those whose existence the institution now considers politically inconvenient. The website features printed versions of both the 2004-2005 and 2005-2006 rosters, which list the players on the team, their heights and weights, their hometowns, and their year in school. These rosters are, in effect, historical documents. Yet they do not contain the names of three students—Dave Evans, Collin Finnerty, and Reade Seligmann—who played for Duke during both seasons. According to the Duke website’s official version of events, Evans, Finnerty, and Seligmann were never on the Duke men’s lacrosse team. [“Laughter and Forgetting in Durham,” DIW, October 8, 2006]

   The parallel is to Milan Kundera’s poignant tale of people who were expunged from Czechoslovakia’s historical record—even airbrushed out of pictures—after an anti-Semitic purge. Johnson couldn’t “imagine why anyone associated with Duke would have chosen to erase the [three] names…. But Brodhead’s Durham is not Gottwald’s Prague. In a society where information is free, I am confident that righteous forces will prevail….” The righteous forces made unusually quick work of it, and when Evans, Finnerty, and Seligmann appear on the site later that day, Johnson registers it self-importantly as a “small victory in ‘the struggle of memory against forgetting.’”

   A day or so later the Director of Internet Operations for the Duke University Athletics Association explained in an email that it was a technical issue that came up in the process of restoring rosters that had been deleted at the request of the players’ families. Now that could be the bullshit explanation of craven administrators covering their tracks after they were caught red-handed. But there’s no sign that Johnson even considered mundane technical explanations as he tried to fathom the mystery of the three missing players, and even if he doesn’t have a feel for the intricacies of database-driven web sites, he should have enough experience with computers to know how maddeningly routine technical glitches are. He nevertheless frames it as someone “associated with Duke” having “chosen to erase” (my emphasis), which suggests that his bullshit detector was on the fritz again—what could the Duke administration have hoped to achieve by quietly disappearing the three indicted players? And is it really safe to assume all of them are such bunglers that they’d imagine nobody would notice or care?

   I just consulting DIW as I’m getting ready to post, and the “Laughter and Forgetting” entry is gone. So is the incisive comment that someone posted a couple hours after the entry: “The 2003-2004 roster lists one lacrosse player. The 2004-2005 roster lists 24 players. The 2005-2006 roster lists 34 players. Shouldn’t you investigate why all the rosters are grossly incomplete before assuming that there is an attempt to ‘forget’ history?”

   It was all there last time I checked, a week or two ago. And I was all set to point out that at least Johnson was keeping DIW’s historical record intact. Ain’t that somethin’?

   [The post reappeared a few weeks later—sometime after this little incident. There might or might not be a connection]

10. Keep any debate or criticism firmly focussed on trivialities: Professor Lubiano’s so-called “scholarship.”

    And, a while back, a commenter criticized me for suggesting that the Lubiano Trio’s apologia for the Group of 88 could be considered “scholarship,” since Wahneema Lubiano listed the article not on her CV but only in her “recent publications” section. Well, now the article is on her CV, too. [“July Events in the Case,” DIW, August 2, 2008]

    The nine examples above seemed like enough when I pulled this list out of the middle of my first “bullshit” post. But we all like lists of ten, and it so happened that Johnson had just handed me some great material. The comment he’s referring to, about “the Lubiano Trio’s apologia,” is part of an exchange we had about his critique of the lacrosse-case article in Social Text by Robyn Wiegman, Wahneema Lubiano, and Michael Hardt. As I said in my own post soon afterwards, my main point was that his criticism amounted to little more than nitpicking. Our exchange on DIW was interesting and early on it was even illuminating. But I didn’t criticize him for suggesting that the article could be considered scholarship, not in the way he says I did, anyway.

    The relevant thread of our exchange is hard to pick out of all the comments. Here’s the gist of it:

    Me (4/25/08 4:13 AM): Be as shocked as you like about all the factual errors [in the Social Text article]. Sloppiness of that sort is an indication of something, for sure. The points about 60 Minutes and the NY Times are really nitpicking, though, and the other points you call the authors on are, on the whole, peripheral. I’d expect students writing about the article to do a much better job of distinguishing essentials from incidentals. I don’t see how this context calls for any less, especially when you’re writing about a text that your audience doesn’t have free access to.
    
    
    KC Johnson (4/25/08 9:42 AM): I suppose we’ll have to disagree on what constitutes a “trivial” error. It seems to me that when three tenured profs at one of the nation’s leading universities publish an article; and when these same three profs claim that “right-wing” blogs imposed a narrative of the case on their university; and when these same three profs describe FODU as having “embodied” this narrative the “most prominently,” it’s a pretty significant error of fact when these same three profs wholly mischaracterize the stated reason for FODU’s origin….
    
    
    Me (4/25/08 2:42 PM): Prof. Johnson, I guess it’s also a trivial error to say that the Social Text article is listed in Lubiano’s CV when it’s not. It’s listed on her faculty web page under “Recent Publications.” Arguing about whether or not that means it’s “scholarship in her field” is a fine way to trivialize the debate, for sure. But the word “trivial” is yours, not mine. The distinction I’ve been pointing to is between central and peripheral.
    
    
    KC Johnson (4/26/08 1:28 PM): My apologies, by the way, for saying that Lubiano had listed the article under her CV when instead she had listed it under the “recent publications” section of her website—a section in which she has never previously listed op-eds or non-scholarly articles (such as her N&O op-ed, her blog postings on the case, or the Group if 88 ad, of which she was principal author) and had only listed scholarship.
    
    
    Perhaps, however, reharmonizer’s insinuation is correct, and Lubiano is suddenly using that section of her website to list non-scholarly items.
    
    
    Me (never): Concerning Johnson’s last point (1:28 PM), my actual insinuation was that he’s inclined to quibble literalistically about distracting technicalities as a way to short-circuit meaningful debate. He’s played his part perfectly…, but I’ve learned to count on that.

    It takes two to tango, and I won’t pretend that I had nothing to do with the combative tone. I was in his face about some points I’d made on my blog that I wanted him to respond to, and I may have been too gleeful about calling him on his “trivial error.” But “a fine way to trivialize the debate” and “the distinction… between central and peripheral” are straightforward points, and it amazes me that he came back with a sarcastic “apology” that repackaged my criticism as a finicky quibble about where Lubiano puts this and that on her website. I thought I’d made it obvious that I didn’t (and don’t) give a fig whether or not the Social Text article counts as scholarship, or whether or not Lubiano lists it as such. Whether or not “scholarship” is a legitimate concern in this case, it’s not a line of criticism that I can take seriously from a professor whose intellectual standards are so completely negotiable.

    Johnson continues to pretend that I was trying to do to him exactly what I complained he was doing to Wiegman, Lubiano, and Hardt. I think my last comment makes my position crystal clear, but I don’t know whether he ever read that one—it never appeared on DIW. It’s possible that it was lost to some software fluke or moderating slip-up. Or it may be that the DIW comments policy (“Comments are moderated, but with the lightest of touches, to exclude only off-topic comments or obviously racist or similar remarks”) is, like so much else over there, bullshit.

The last point is second-order bullshitting that neutralizes criticism by misconstruing and trivializing it. In general, Johnson’s responses to my criticism have been heavy on bluster, misrepresentation, and ad hominem—those seem like pretty natural ways to defend bullshit. A few months ago some darts flew back and forth between us about my false claim that “50 percent of DIW’s posts were about the Duke professoriate.” (not that he actually reads my blog, you understand, but he hears things). It was an even fussier version of the exchange about Lubiano’s scholarship, down to the “apology,” this time offered for “assuming that this Group apologist [i.e., me] referenced the faculty with his (incorrect) claim.” I’m not sure if the self-serving insincere apology is one of Johnson’s rhetorical staples, but dismissive pigeonholing is definitely one of them—what value could the opinion of a “Group apologist” possibly have? He slaps the same label on Robert Perkinson in the post that ends with his carping about my 50 percent figure, apparently because Perkinson was not convinced by the case against Duke faculty and said so in his review of Johnson’s book. Since I’m at Duke, tribalist logic dictates that I’m probably an apologist. Perkinson is at the University of Hawai’i and has no obvious ties to Duke. He’s a leftist, though, and I guess that’s enough. The pigeonholing can be a lot more elaborate—my first appearance on DIW is at the end of a ten-paragraph narration of the so-called “Group of 88 rehab tour.” Johnson wraps it up by introducing me as another one of the washed-out bums on the bus—at that point everyone knows where things stand, and he can proceed to demolish my criticism.

On the other hand, I introduced Johnson on my blog as “irrational,” “anti-academic,” and “insidiously polarizing.” They’re charges that have held up well, too. Of course Johnson objected—who wouldn’t? One way he fought back was to try out those descriptions on a list of people I hadn’t criticized as harshly but who surely deserved it more. Eventually he found his way to former Duke professor Stuart Rojstaczer. In a passage I cited approvingly from Rojstaczer’s review of Until Proven Innocent, he writes that “[w]ith regard to the ‘Group of 88,’ Taylor and Johnson are engaging in demagoguery. Certainly there are some left-wing crackpots at Duke (and no doubt some right-wing crackpots).” Johnson replied that “[s]ome people might consider calling members of the faculty ‘crackpots’ to be ‘insidiously polarizing,’ ‘irrational,’ and ‘anti-academic’.” The weasel-wording pretty much guarantees that he’s right, and no doubt some people really are that clueless about tone (Johnson may be one of them—it would explain a lot). But Rojstaczer’s casual hyperbole is hard to miss. Add that in and the objection to “crackpots” turns into bullshit, and a fine example of Johnson’s fetish for literalism to boot.

Focussing on that editorial makes a great deal of Johnson’s subsequent blogging seem redundant. Probably that has more to do with 20-20 hindsight and my poor opinion of DIW than anything else. The blog went on and on, though, accumulating a lot of detail but very little depth. I might feel differently if the editorial had been about the criminal investigation. In the three posts Johnson wrote for Cliopatria in April 2006—the start of what would become Durham-in-Wonderland—he touched on Reade Seligmann’s convincing alibi, the flawed line-ups, and Nifong’s political opportunism and the pandering that went with it. Those turned out to be good indicators of how the prosecution would go (how it would crash and burn, that is), and Johnson read the signs more accurately than many of the rest of us. The stakes were high, and there was every reason to keep a close eye on what Nifong was doing. But as the title says, the editorial is about “Duke’s Poisoned Campus Culture,” and the problems with the investigation are only mentioned to show how clouded and agenda-driven the judgment of many professors at Duke had been. Based on DIW, Johnson seems to have been as prescient about those professors as he was about Nifong. But within the frame of such a sprawling narrative, prescience and tunnel vision can be hard to tell apart, and when it comes to Duke’s campus culture, it’s tunnel vision that dominates in DIW.

Johnson was already blogging and editorializing about academic culture issues when the charges against the lacrosse team hit the news. The ideological skew of Duke’s faculty figured in a piece he wrote for Inside Higher Ed the previous summer. From it he recycles a bad joke about stupid conservatives told by the chairman of Duke’s philosophy department, giving it vastly overblown significance as stage-setting for the lacrosse case. His glaring evidence of poison, though—the foundation of his ongoing critique of Duke faculty—is the “listening” statement, which he’d written about for the first time about a week earlier. Along with the statement came the so-called “Group of 88” (his term, I believe) who endorsed it, professors he found so transparent that he casually extrapolates their collective thinking to its “logical, if absurd, extreme”—some lacrosse players should be convicted for rape just because of who they are, no matter what they did or didn’t do.

After the editorial, the only significant change I see in Johnson’s picture of Duke’s campus culture is his assessment of Brodhead and of the lacrosse players, which quickly becomes morally simplistic. In fact a key passage is different in the version of the editorial posted on DIW (overstruck words are on Inside Higher Ed and the italicized word is in the blog):

Few would deny that several players on Duke’s lacrosse team have behaved repulsively badlly [sic]. Two team captains hired exotic dancers, supplied alcohol to underage team members, and concluded a public argument with one of the dancers with racial epithets. Brodhead appropriately cancelled the team’s season and demanded the coach’s resignation.

As far as his trumped-up “Group” goes, things remain the same without even changing much. In the editorial, Johnson writes, “It’s hard to escape the conclusion that, for [Houston] Baker and many others who signed the faculty statement, the race, class, and gender of the men’s lacrosse team produced a guilty-until-proven-innocent mentality.” It was hard for him to escape the conclusion, that’s for sure. Fast-forward to “Legacies,” his final post before putting DIW on hiatus in December 2007, and he highlights the “race/class/gender extremists” who jerked the administration’s chain and were “only too willing to advance their personal, pedagogical, or ideological agendas on the backs of their own students.” Another major legacy he chooses to reinforce is “the pernicious effects of academic groupthink,” a theme that he first brought up in DIW in late May 2006 (the legacy he doesn’t mention is DIW’s remarkable success at fostering its own little groupthink community, part of a gossiping network of like-minded sites).

On the face of it, it’s hard for me to see how a historian could spend a year and a half analyzing an ongoing controversy and find nothing that poses a significant challenge to his earliest firm impressions of it. It’s a record that suggests that the project isn’t really analysis, and in fact it turns out to be more like prosecution. There’s no denying that the most prominent and vocal of the faculty he criticizes did nothing overt to break the mold—they stuck close to their issues or were silent, so Johnson is fully justified in sticking to his guns as well. Still, there’s a lot of filtering out of things he apparently doesn’t want the ladies and gentlemen of the jury to be thinking about. And filtering alone isn’t enough to support the one-sided case he seems determined to make. It also requires quite a bit of what I’ve described as misrepresentation, manipulation, distortion, etc. Now I realize there’s a better word for all that, one that really captures the spirit of Johnson’s anti-academic crusade—bullshit.

It was a reader’s comment that got me thinking about how useful the word is (I’ll get back to the comment later), and then I remembered a little book I bought a few years ago called On Bullshit, written by Princeton philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt. One of my favorite lines from it—part of a discussion of whether bullshit is analogous to “carelessly made, shoddy goods”—brings out the book’s quietly surreal juxtaposition of subject and style.

Excrement is not designed or crafted at all; it is merely emitted, or dumped. It may have a more or less coherent shape, or it may not, but it is in any case certainly not wrought.

The “essence of bullshit,” according to Frankfurt, is a “lack of connection to a concern with truth—[an] indifference to how things really are.” That sets it apart not only from truth-telling but also from lying, because you have to consider the truth before you can tell a lie. In a helpful review of the book in Slate, Timothy Noah gives as an example the claim the famously surfaced in President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address, about Saddam Hussein’s efforts to buy nuclear material from Niger. The possible basis for that claim is murky enough that it might not be the best example, but assuming for the sake of argument that it was as bogus as Bush’s critics believe, it does seem more like indifference to the truth than like a conscious decision to peddle outright falsehood.

Both in lying and in telling the truth people are guided by their beliefs concerning the way things are. These guide them as they endeavor either to describe the world correctly or describe it deceitfully. For this reason, telling lies does not tend to unfit a person for telling the truth in the same way that bullshitting tends to. Through excessive indulgence in the latter activity, which involves making assertions without paying attention to anything except what it suits one to say, a person’s normal habit of attending to the way things are may become attenuated or lost.

Noah’s example brings out a limitation of Frankfurt’s schematic analysis, though. In many real-world situations even the most honest person can’t be sure about “the way things are.” What I think stands for “the truth” in those situations is honest, dispassionate analysis, even though it might lead different people to different truths. With respect to national security matters like the yellowcake from Niger, the uncertainty and inaccessibility of the evidence seems to be a standing invitation to bullshit—one that’s frequently accepted by politicians of all stripes. The Bush administration seems to find it especially irresistible, and even compared to other political machines they’re way out of the “normal habit of attending to the way things are.”

It isn’t just a matter of “what it suits one to say,” though. First of all, bullshit isn’t likely to work if it isn’t plausible and/or appealing to the intended audience. And it usually serves some purpose or furthers some agenda—justifying a war, for instance. Johnson treats the lacrosse case as a battlefront in the culture war, so even though he approaches the fight more like a prosecutor than a general his purpose isn’t so different from Bush’s. His analysis is thoroughly agenda-driven—scratch the surface, and you’re likely to find some bullshit. And it can be pretty easy to identify. He’s covered the scandal from a distance, drawing on essays, interviews, news reports, and the like. Often in DIW all you have to do is follow the helpful link to the original text. There’s a fair chance that it’s been manipulated to show that the person who said or wrote it has exactly the values and beliefs that you’d expect from a race/class/gender extremist, or else it’s been fudged to bring out the topsy-turvy irrationality of Wonderland, where the crazies and cowards are running the show. Some of Johnson’s bullshit is generated in other ways, but the end it serves is pretty consistent.

I made a list of some of the more obvious bullshit I’ve come across in DIW, but it’s gotten so long enough that I’ll post it separately, within a day or two. [Here it is.] Much of it comes from earlier entries, though: What Mark Anthony Neal supposedly hears students mutter at the beginning of the new semester, the persecution of Steven Baldwin, and just about everything Johnson wrote about Karla Holloway’s article “Coda: Body of Evidence.”

It’s one thing for a self-appointed pundit to churn out bullshit—it’s practically the job description. Even a moderate amount of bullshit from someone backed by the power of law enforcement is a much more serious thing. Nifong seems to have been a copious, shameless bullshitter, and the consequences were disastrous for the people who ended up under his thumb. The silver lining is that in the end it all came back to haunt him. In the first flush of news coverage he spent hours and hours feeding the beast what it wanted to hear. Speaking to N&O reporter Joe Neff, James Coleman starts off sounding a bit like Frankfurt:

“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.”

A line of bullshit that was all too effective in rallying the Duke community and neighbors against the lacrosse team was the bit about how they were stonewalling. It seems to have been largely the work of Durham Police Cpl. David Addison. Among his deceptive statements was this one, to the Durham Herald-Sun: “Addison said police approached the lacrosse team with the five-page search warrant on March 16, but that all of the members refused to cooperate with the investigation.” In fact after the search warrant was executed co-captains David Evans, Dan Flannery and Matt Zash volunteered to be interviewed by the police at length and without counsel present.

In late April 2006, a headline in USA Today announced “A perfect storm: Explosive convergence helps lacrosse scandal resonate.” Behind the storm, according to the article, was the “national flash points of race, class, gender, violence, money and privilege.” (James Coleman’s pithy reply a year later: sure it was a perfect storm, “but we know now it was based on this false notion a crime had been committed…. That generated everything.”). Duke is a sprawling institution that tries to be a great many things to a great many people, and it’s my sense that the lacrosse team became a vessel not only for the reflexive shock and disgust tied to those “national flash points” but also for various smoldering frustrations with the university. From where I sit now the collective reaction of much of the community looks like a body ejecting diseased cells that had been circulating undetected. It wasn’t pretty, that’s for sure.

It was not only irresponsible but a remarkable lapse of common sense if, as alleged in one of the ongoing civil suits, the message from the Duke administration to the players was “you don’t need a lawyer,” and “don’t tell anyone this is happening, not even your parents” (McFayden et al v. Duke University et al, p. 129). And it’s true, as Tim Tyson recently noted, that folks around campus were reacting to information that came from people who were in a unique position to know—the police and the prosecutor. In different circumstances, though, if the accused had looked more like the people who are typical charged with violent crimes, the word of the authorities would likely have been taken with healthy skepticism if not disdain. It seems like that skepticism should cut both ways. All in all it was fertile ground for Addison’s misinformation. Some people, including a number of professors who really should have known better, took it as an excuse to indulge in a little high-handed vigilantism, for example by singling the players out in class or in private communications and exhorting them to fess up.

No one took up the invitation to vigilantism and ran further with it than the potbangers. It took some bullshitting to fit real-life events and people to their metanarrative—another dimension to the mirror-image parallelism between the potbangers and KC Johnson that I pointed out in my first post about the case. For both, “perfecting” and bullshitting seem to go hand in hand (that’s using—maybe abusing—a term that I continue to find very apt, introduced into the debate by Wahneema Lubiano). For the potbangers, the need to embroider went beyond just “perfecting” the offenders and the “survivor.” What stands out to me is the bizarre reasoning that took a form of protest from tight-knit but underpoliced third-world communities and dropped it into the middle of a first-world media feeding frenzy.

This is a good place to bring up the comment that got me thinking about bullshit in the first place, since it puts the potbangers into sharp relief. It’s from RRH, an attorney and also a mainstay of the DIW commentariat, part of an interesting exchange we had about how and why our perspectives on the case are so profoundly different.

Attorneys have heard—or heard from other attorneys—nearly every cockamamie story there is. Thus, we have developed internal “bullshit-detectors” that are so finely tuned that they are probably exceeded by only those of cops. Thus, when I heard the first reports about lacrosse case in 2006 (on ESPN), I was skeptical to the point just short of disbelief. The story is that several Alpha-male college students were going to risk reputations, diseases, paternity lawsuits, future careers, and family shame to put their most precious body parts into a party stripper? As we say in the legal business, that story already “strained credulity”.

And that’s even without the added allegation that the sex was involuntary. A party stripper with such fastidious morals and high standards of sex partners that she was going to turn down a chance for mating with such Alpha-males? Again, the bullshit-detector is sounding like an air raid siren.

I don’t understand how the “allegation that the sex was involuntary” could be in addition to the first reports, and the pop sociobiology doesn’t do much for me. But I don’t at all dismiss the bullshit detector he’s talking about, and it seems to me that there’s more behind it than just stories. “Perfecting” clients would surely be a great way to be a lousy lawyer. To be effective in the nitty-gritty of a criminal proceeding, it seems to me you’d have to be firmly in touch with the unvarnished and sometimes unpalatable humanity of everyone involved. That realization has helped me to clarify the nature and ethics of the choice that was made by protesters who felt they needed to shout slogans as if there was no question a rape occurred. Their perspective on the accuser—at the time not really “Crystal Mangum” but the heavily filtered impressions of her from the media and police—may be more palatable than RRH’s, but those protesters could and in my opinion did get things wildly wrong without experiencing any significant consequences.

It doesn’t take RRH’s crude realism to rein in the bullshit. It seems to me, anyway, that enough mental discipline to keep the accuser in the realm of everyday, imperfect human beings should be sufficient. I understand and respect the desire to resist dismissive and demeaning efforts to put rape accusers on trial in the court of public opinion and undercut them in the court of law. There is a big temptation to put a positive spin on the accuser, but it seems to be hard to do without getting into some euphemistic bullshit, even when it’s not nearly as idealizing as the potbanger’s rhetoric. For instance, Cathy Davidson, a professor of English at Duke, asks, “Who is that exotic dancer? A single mother who takes off her clothes for hire partly to pay for tuition at a distinguished historically black college.” Her main point is socioeconomic—in different circumstances she could have replaced “takes off her clothes” with “cleans toilets seven nights a week” or “serves as a guinea pig for grueling pharmaceutical trials”—so it may not be entirely fair to single her out. But I feel like I’ve seen a number of variations on the theme of student mom reduced to stripping to get an education, and they have a sanitized feel that calls to mind noxious Hollywood fairy tales like “Pretty Woman.” The rhetoric kicked up by recent news that Mangum graduated from North Carolina Central showed that she’s still little more than a rhetorical football for both sides. It was a starkly symbolic and ironic event that could have provoked some sharp analysis but didn’t.

My feeling is that one purpose of the critical analysis and writing we assign to our undergraduates is building up their resistance to bullshit. Whether or not that’s a common opinion, it seems like professors, of all people, should be bullshit detectors and not bullshit producers. And not just detectors pointed at the other side—as I’ve shown by example many times, that’s the easy part. I can think of only two at Duke who’ve stood out for their non-partisan bullshit detecting—James Coleman and Michael Gustafson. It’s a discredit to the professors on the Left—especially but not only at Duke—that they had nothing to say about the poor judgment and poor reasoning of the potbangers and like-minded protesters. (The one exception I’m aware of is Wahneema Lubiano, of all people. I wish her reservations about “perfecting” had been less equivocal and more forthright, but those aren’t the main reasons her critics were so insistent about misconstruing her.)

The main problem on the Duke side of the lacrosse case wasn’t bullshit, it was a callous and opportunistic attitude towards the students who were facing drastic legal consequences. But the Duke faculty definitely contributed some bullshit, too. Houston Baker’s histrionic letter is probably the standout. Parts of it—“And when will the others assaulted by racist epithets while passing 610 Buchanan ever forget that dark moment brought on them by a group of drunken Duke boys?,” etc.—are not only bullshit, they’re pretentious bullshit. It’s my impression that many liestoppers would put Cathy Davidson’s January 2007 editorial high on the bullshit scale. Taken as a whole I don’t see why it’s so offensive—a lot of it strikes me as honest and conciliatory—but she does start out with a whopper, claiming that in the rhetorical climate that motivated the “listening” statement, “defending David Evans, Collin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann necessitated reverting to pernicious stereotypes about African-Americans, especially poor black women.” Not only had those three not been indicted when the “listening” statement was published, they hadn’t even been singled out from the rest of the team as likely suspects. For someone writing an editorial that purports to explain key events of the first few intense weeks of the scandal, this suggests great indifference to “the way things are” and a serious failure to “pay[] attention to anything except what it suits one to say.”

I imagine that the line that serves as Karla Holloway’s motto on DIW—“White innocence means black guilt. Men’s innocence means women’s guilt”—would also be ranked as prime bullshit by her critics. Understood in context, I think that’s debatable. It seems to me that it’s not with any particular statement that she most clearly lapses into bullshit, it’s her general failure to own up to her role in stirring up the bitter discourse that she found so onerous, and her tendency to place herself outside and on the receiving end of the university’s power structure. And then there’s the “listening” statement. For me it’s the first line—“We are listening to our students”—that stands out as obvious bullshit. They were listening to some of their students. It’s too much like the vacuous cliché about listening to the “will of the American people” that’s endlessly falling out of the mouths of politicians.

It’s a pretty good measure of the real purpose and integrity of DIW that, leaving aside Baker’s letter, which is pretty much a sitting duck, Johnson responds to most of this stuff from the Duke side with bullshit of his own. The DIW impression of Holloway’s infamous line is largely an artifact of Johnson’s bullshit. And after pointing out the factual silliness of Davidson’s mention of the three indicted players, he turns to the statement she surely meant to make, about rhetoric in defense of the lacrosse players generally.

In late March, when the idea for the Group of 88’s statement originated, who—either on Duke’s campus or in the media—was elevating the lacrosse players “to the status of martyrs, innocent victims of reverse racism”? Certainly not the protesters to whom Davidson and the other Group members said “thank you”…. Between March 29 and the issuance of the Group’s statement on April 6, were members of the media or cable news network talking heads elevating the lacrosse players “to the status of martyrs, innocent victims of reverse racism”?

He starts by asking exactly the right question, then gives a non-answer that’s really just an excuse to slip in one of his boilerplate formulas for denouncing the “Group,” and finally comes to rest on “media or cable news network talking heads.” It may be bullshit to claim that there was backlash against black students, and “[t]he insults, at that time, were rampant.” I can’t say for sure either way. But I’m confident that a great deal was said and felt by students walking across campus at night, say, or down a dorm hallway, that wasn’t picked up by any “talking heads” or even in the campus paper. No doubt it suits Johnson to believe that he was getting a complete and accurate impression of events at Duke as he was following the news from several states away. It’s self-serving bullshit, though, especially coming from a historian dabbling in journalism—people in both fields are supposed to have some sophistication about the way their evidence is mediated. He could have gleaned at least a hint of what black students experienced at the time from the comments quoted in the “listening” statement. But he never treats those students as if they’re worth listening to (he does suggest in an obnoxious reference to them as “alleged students [who] can testify as to what they said” that they’d be good subjects for an inquisition).

At least two Duke professors picked up echos in the lacrosse incident of institutionalized, open, and often violent racism of the old South. For both there’s a close connection to their scholarly work. Both allude to the unproven nature of the rape allegations and claim to be setting them aside while they consider other aspects of the students’ behavior that evening, but it seems to me that the impression of the brutality of the alleged crime still filters into their judgment (see James Coleman’s comment above about the perfect storm). Tim Tyson saw the “spirit of the lynch mob” in the crowd of young men at the party. William Chafe saw a continuation of the “poisonous linkage of race and sex as instruments of power and control” that’s integral to southern history. I know that for me and many others, the impression of a gang of young white men clustered drunkenly around a couple of half-naked black women had some very ugly resonances. But that’s a gut response, and it seems like neither Chase or Tyson gave it the critical consideration they should have before they said their piece. I’ve already described my reservations with Tyson’s lynch mob analogy. Turning to Chafe, how much context, really, does Emmett Till—brutally beaten and then shot, eye gouged out, barbed wire strung around his neck—provide for that party? In both cases, there is a bullshit gap, I guess you could call it. In fact the gap seems so obvious, especially in Chafe’s case, that I have to believe that, for better or worse, the point is sincere.

Mark Anthony Neal’s comments about “racialized sexual violence” pull the same general issues into a more contemporary context—relating the lacrosse incident not to old-fashioned lynching and brutality but to the present-day media-driven discourse that holds that “black women and their bodies have little value, little protection and are accessible to anyone who feels entitled to them.” It seems to me that this makes some contact with the spirit of the party. There was, for instance, the infamous parting shot: “Hey bitch, thank your grandpa for my nice cotton shirt.” (According to KC Johnson it’s “a tasteless rip-off of a Chris Rock joke”—a widely held opinion that I find entirely plausible, but it’s typical of the mountain of self-perpetuating verbiage that’s been left by this scandal that I can’t find a source pinning the joke to any particular Chris Rock show. I did find a thread on the TalkLeft forums initiated by someone wanting to know the same thing—after 200+ comments there’s no definitive conclusion.) Being more plugged into the here and now turns out to have its dangers—it leads Neal into some speculation about how the lacrosse team may have been “hoping to consume something that they felt that a black woman uniquely possessed.” That would be blatant bullshit if it wasn’t framed as speculation—perhaps it still counts, but it’s most problematic for other reasons.

Neal is capable of writing with style and insight about the “fo’ real,” as he calls it, but in this case the elision he makes between rhetorical violence and brutal physical assault lands him in bullshit territory. RRH’s caustic perspective is again an antidote, a reminder of how animalistic the alleged acts would have been, and the deeply ingrained barriers that would have had to be overcome. It seems to me that a more incisive point of reference is the typical scenarios for alcohol- and entitlement-fueled assaults involving college students, which usually involve some mutual socializing and perhaps mixed signals as well. It’s not hard to see how the inhibition is overcome in those circumstances, and it’s not far-fetched that there could be some acting out of the kind of rhetoric Neal highlighted.

The final step in RRH’s bullshit detecting is statistical—“Single-offender white on black rapes are so infrequent that they show up usually as asterisks in crime statistics, and white multiple offender rapes of black women are barely more frequent than carjackings by Amish farmers.” It’s grounds for skepticism, for sure, but it’s just a mindless number that could be hiding who knows what biases or artifacts. There’s little if any insight in it.