I once heard a female professor of mathematics talk about an encounter she had with a senior colleague soon after taking her first faculty job. He told her that he didn’t think she belonged there because he knew for a fact that women weren’t good at math. Coming from a math professor, of all people, the reasoning is mind-boggling — surely he understood the basics of probability distributions. It could be true that on average women are less capable mathematicians than men and also true that this particular woman was more capable than most men, including a certain professor standing in the hall making an ass of himself at that very moment.

That’s the basic problem with believing that you’re smarter than a whole class of other people — it tends to make you stupid. That anecdote is my favorite example (and it’s just an anecdote, so take it with a grain of salt — I have no reason to doubt the woman who told it but I don’t have a lot of faith in my own memory). It’s been on my mind because of the exchanges last week between Ta-Nehisi Coates and Andrew Sullivan about race and IQ. I have a second-favorite example, too, and unlike the first one it’s documented in fantastic detail. It’s been sitting on my hard disk for a long time, part of a collection of half-written blog posts that just gets more impressive every year. I guess now’s the time, finally.

The presumed fool in this story is also a woman, and the operating assumption is that she’s a scientific ignoramus. Not because she’s a woman, of course, but because she’s a feminist, which is a much better reason. Specifically — not that it really matters, because they all think alike — it’s Amanda Marcotte, prima donna of Pandagon. Feminists hold science in contempt and don’t even believe in reality, and you don’t need to know any science to see what a scientific ignoramus a person like that is.

Her opposite number is Jeff Goldstein, the guru who for 10 gleeful years has been serving glistening gobs of Protein Wisdom from a can. Just like Newt, he sounds like a smart person is supposed to sound, only you don’t have to be dumb to think that, just easily impressed. Like David Thompson, for instance, who’s our unreliable narrator, or something.

A lot of the story is a pretty typical episode of the echo chamber follies, just with an especially united front of willful ignorance. Goldstein ratchets the pretense up with a load of his patented intellectual spam. Meanwhile, Thompson takes the knee-jerk assumptions about who’s smarter up a notch, commenting that Goldstein “probably [has] quite a few IQ points” on Marcotte. So guess which one has a clue about basic evolutionary biology?

Once upon a time almost 3 years ago, Amanda Marcotte wrote a blog post about Nadya Suleman (“Octo-Mom”). She starts it by quoting a blogger who had assumed that “the desire to have children is a very normal, biological urge” and had then speculated that the urge had gone haywire in Suleman’s case. That’s not a biological urge, Marcotte counters — it’s socially constructed.

For David Thompson, this is just the kind of entertaining nonsense he’s come to expect.

Note that Ms Marcotte is quite insistent on this point. The inclination to reproduce simply is a cultural construct, and a dubious one at that. Why humans should apparently be unique in this regard, untouched by biology, isn’t entirely clear. Presumably, human beings - specifically human men - have constructed elaborate patterns of behaviour to mimic almost exactly biological inclinations that are felt as real, by men and women, but which don’t in fact exist.

When it’s the commenters’ turn to get their licks in, Thompson’s message is boiled down to its lowest-common-denominator essentials: Marcotte is an agenda-driven fool and her ideas are pure rubbish.

So when birds and bees feel the urge to have baby birds and baby bees, it’s biology. But when humans feel the urge, it’s a cultural construct. [posted by carbon based lifeform]

This is stupidity so high and rarefied that it leaves one gasping for breath. It is on exactly the same level as stating that the urge to find food is a cultural construct. [David Gillies]

Isn’t she self-nominating for a Darwin Award? [georgesdelaotour]

No, there’s nothing to think about. This woman is a notorious idiot, nothing she says is interesting or sensible or intellectually provocative, she’s the most predictable form of brainless, ideological zealot. [Amos (my emphasis, though, because what could be more perfect?)]

Unfortunately, if we ‘educate’ vast numbers of people beyond the level of their intelligence, we will get dross like that spouted by Marcotte and Freethinker. [paul ilc]

Ignorance can be a lot of fun in the right atmosphere, and Thompson is good at cultivating it. The idea that it’s biology when bees feel the urge to have baby bees is above and beyond, though — seems like “carbon based lifeform” may have watched “Bee Movie” and “Bugs Life” a few too many times. Exactly one person gets the basic biology right, but his mild comment that he’s “not sure there is a ‘reproductive instinct’” doesn’t seem to have left any impression [1]. Thompson may have had some doubts. He seems to be fishing around when he drops in a comment to say that Marcotte “seems to be claiming that the species’ inclination to reproduce (or become pregnant, or to parent or whatever) is real only as a malleable social construct.” And if he’s wrong, he suggests, it’s because of Marcotte’s “knotty and erratic thinking.” Bullshit! Her description of the biological inclination is just fine — there’s nothing knotty or even social-contracty about it.

As far as I know, there’s no evidence whatsoever for the popular theory that women are born with the urge to breed that’s as real as the sexual urge. It doesn’t make sense that we would have an inborn urge to have babies that is a separate thing from the urge to have sex—sex seems to be nature’s way to convince most of us, at least, to breed. Reliable contraception was only invented, relative to human history, about yesterday. We don’t evolve so quickly that a natural urge to procreate would have to evolve to keep us alive in response to our newfound ability to separate sex and procreation.

It’s actually Thompson who is imagining that humans are un-biological. Marcotte is insisting that the human reproductive drive is biological, i.e., the same as in every other animal. Unlike Thompson & Co., she understands that the only way to get an inborn, biological urge is to evolve it. The only way to evolve an “urge to have babies” is if that urge translates into the act of mating. But all that’s needed to get animals to mate is an urge to mate, and for hundreds of millions of years that’s done the job. Lady rabbits don’t sidle over to their partner, feeling somehow incomplete, and say in bunny body language, “Oh honey, I wanna have a baaaaybeee!” The call of the wild is “let’s get it on!” There’s absolutely no evidence that humans have evolved a different urge. What we’ve evolved is the ability to manage the urge, because we can make the conscious connection between sex and babies.

Marcotte’s piece has shortcomings, of course. Sex is not the only innate urge involved in human reproduction — unlike guppies, humans can’t just squirt the little suckers out, we have to raise ‘em up, too. And I agree with the general impression that she writes dogmatically about social constructs. It’s as if they were hashed out by a bunch of guys in a smoke-filled room and handed down to posterity. As far as science goes, though, it’s not ignorance or contempt that stands out but matter-of-fact acceptance and the way it’s juxtaposed with uncritical articles of feminist faith — that’s how it looks to me, anyway. [2]

Thompson and his merry band of wankers are fixated on a dumb feminist, though, so they’ve airbrushed out any detail that might make you, like, stop and think “hmmm, maybe she’s right about that.” They’re left with a pin-up that makes them feel real smart, and when she says “social construct” and “patriarchy” it’s just… soooo… hhhhhotttt! Any sign that she has a brain would obviously spoil the fun.

It’s an awfully pathetic and mean-spirited way to get your ego stroked, but it’s not all scorn and derision in Thompson’s clubhouse. Down in the comments, he takes a moment to look up to someone he admires.

James S: Does Marcotte actually respond to criticism?

Thompson: [F]rom what I’ve seen,… if it’s realistic criticism and challenges her recurring assumptions (of which there are so many) then it’s very rarely engaged, and not well. If you browse the, er, exchanges of views between Marcotte and Jeff at Protein Wisdom, you’ll see that Jeff generally makes a point of engaging with criticism and specifics, sometimes at great length. Sadly, this favour isn’t returned. As I said, a visit to Pandagon is not unlike stumbling into some kind of church. It’s a gathering of the faithful.

James S: Wow. Anyone who proves her wrong is a sexist, racist hater.

Thompson: In fairness, there are probably quite a few IQ points between Jeff and Amanda, but the point remains that one of them engages with criticism in a serious (if sometimes mocking) way, while the other does not. Instead, she denounces unbelievers. Actually, it can be fun to watch Jeff fence with his more substantial critics. The exchanges with Professor Ric Caric leap to mind. … In many ways he’s like a smarter Marcotte and uses similar tactics but with, ahem, Academic Gravitas™. [emphasis added]

The really fascinating part of that, for me, is the way he sets Caric up as “a smarter Marcotte.” Any fool can look at the right-thinking people and the wrong-thinking people and figure out who’s smarter. But when you have two equally benighted individuals, what do you do? There are a couple of knee-jerk heuristics Thompson might have used, but maybe it’s a little more subtle and more personal than that. If the smarter one is “more substantial,” and if by “substantial” you mean that he produces a lot of text that lets our hero cut a dashing figure as he thrusts and parries, then the nod definitely goes to Caric.

From what I’ve seen, anyway, Goldstein thoroughly enjoyed his encounters with Caric. In July 2007, Caric presented a laundry list of all the deplorable things he’d found on PW and all of its connections to other deplorable sites, people, and ideas. Goldstein had no trouble answering and dismissing the individual points, and overall he was delighted with Caric’s disapproval, delighted to return it. A few days later, Caric was back with a conventional homily on racism, framed with a few sarcastic jabs at Goldstein. It was a perfect opportunity for Goldstein to play literary critic and expound his own iconoclastic philosophy of race. To be accused of bigotry by an certified Professor of Mindless Diversity is mother’s milk to Goldstein.

Maybe there have been exchanges like that between Marcotte and Goldstein. They’re natural adversaries, for sure, and in a tribalistic way they could be really useful to each other. What I found, though, is a one-liner Marcotte posted about a month after those exchanges with Caric:

The perfect person to deny that many conservative men act out of a sense of anxious masculinity is a guy who pulls his dick out 25 times a day to make sure it’s still there.

So you can see why “Academic Gravitas™” makes for a “smarter Marcotte” — unlike the real thing, it never draws blood. And it’s not like Goldstein is above this kind of thing. He’s happy to respond in kind in Marcotte’s comments and then with his own post. More recently he put Scott Eric Kaufman down as “an intellectual vagina” who’d birthed an “Asian gal’s ping pong ball.” It’s an amazing genital-racial metaphor, especially when you consider that the ping pong ball — some guy who sent Goldstein an obnoxious email — is presumed black.

Anyway, Caric is just a guy with a blog, like the rest of us peons. Goldstein and Marcotte are big-time bloggers, and there are good reasons for that — they’re both fluent, productive writers who project a strong personality, though their styles are worlds apart. Marcotte is general-interest magazine kind of writer — Newsweek, not The New Yorker. Aside from a bit of feminist lingo, maybe, and niche topics like skepticism, anyone who can follow The Daily Show can drop in on Pandagon and get what Marcotte is writing about. Goldstein demands more time and effort. His writing is a performance, it directs attention to the writer, and it’s full of arcane material that pulls you into his world. His style puts him in the center of a circle of readers who are focussed on his very conspicuous erudition, among other things. The impression of intelligence isn’t necessarily false, and if for some reason you had to guess his IQ and compare it to Marcotte’s, that’s probably the thing to go with. But the comparison is a lot more interesting than that. You can get a sense from their styles of the general character of the two writers, with the political slant and subject matter factored out — Marcotte is upfront, accessible, and unguarded while Goldstein is showy, manipulative, and entrenched.

Goldstein is a very gifted writer, though, no doubt about it. When he’s not being self-consciously intellectual, he’s a superb hard-hitting, mad-as-hell editorialist. He also has an impressive ability to generate baroque highbrow text that’s also impassioned and readable, and he can get a lot of verbal mileage out of a small idea.

Because for Limbaugh’s signs to acquire the meaning the Obama camp wants viewers to take away from their presentation, those signs must be entirely severed from their original intent. And it is only at that point - when the interpretative process is left up to the intentions of a receiver who has naught but the signifiers to go on, thanks to the dishonest and intentional removal of all the indexes to original intent that occur inside the signified context of the utterer (eg., metatextual clues signaling irony or parody; think of lines being lifted from Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” and being used by Obama to suggest that Swift “wants to exterminated the poor of Ireland”), that one can argue that Limbaugh’s piece “means” what the Obama camp suggests it means.

I think Marcotte would just write something like this (the part in bold corresponds to the passage above): The two lines were sarcastic when Limbaugh said them, but there’s nothing to clue you in about that in Obama’s ad — the ad makes it seem like Limbaugh was being serious (and then she’d add something like, Good Work! Maybe Obama’s finally grown some ovaries!).

In the post I just quoted, Goldstein uses eight dense paragraphs to explain that deceptive out-of-context quoting is a “crass rhetorical trick.” That’s what it takes, I guess, to show how this commonplace principle of intellectual integrity is actually a profound manifestation of intentionalism. The bottom line, anyway, is that “once one understands intentionalism, one realizes that there is nothing else:”

we either appeal to the intent of the author in order to “interpret,” or we privilege our own intent, which is what happens when we refuse to allow the original signs to act as anything more than signifiers upon which we then graft our own meaning.

Goldstein takes this idea of intentionalism very seriously, as you can see. It’s one of his signature causes. He takes it personally, too. Look what happened when Scott Eric Kaufman wrote that Goldstein had “fully embraced” the theory of Ayers ghostwriting for Obama, when in fact he had only used the theory as a hypothetical in a “rather academic exhortation on the various beings of agency.” It was a gross misrepresentation of his intentions, and Kaufman did it knowing full well that “those predisposed to read his political hackery are similarly predisposed to avoid confronting primary texts.” Goldstein threw an epic temper tantrum, and who can blame him?

So naturally, when Goldstein criticized Marcotte’s “octo-mom” post he was careful to privilege her intent. After all, it’s a matter of basic critical integrity, as applicable to a loathsome enemy like Marcotte as to a friend like Rush. And after about 43 seconds of careful study, he realized that the primary, topical purpose of the article is to dismiss the notion that there’s a biological urge to have babies, first of all because it’s a myth, and second of all because it puts the onus of reproduction on women and their inchoate yearnings (he couldn’t help chuckling at the thought of a feminist trying to win an argument by invoking science).

Ha! Goldstein already knows all about social construct theorists and don’t need to bother with no stinkin’ text! And anyway, Marcotte’s post was predigested for him by his warmup act, Darleen Click, who realized that “no where would [Amanda] state something so positively about homosexuality or transgenderism… no, those aren’t subject to change at all, no social construct there. Heh.” (it’s so very taxing, you see, for Darleen to have Amanda all up in her head not stating things). When Goldstein stepped in with some thoughts about “Ms Marcotte’s (predictable) position,” he congratulated Click for the “nice gotcha moment.” “Social construct theorists like Amanda are often trapped by inconsistencies in their own arguments,” he notes, and then uses some big, bonecrushing words to trap her between one (predictable) position he misrepresents and another that he imagines. If there’s one thing those folks really love it’s a gotcha moment, and lack of evidence is no reason to miss out on the fun. Comments she left under her post suggest that Marcotte has a somewhat more subtle position on homosexuality — she writes that it’s still “real” even though “[it] has an environmental component” — but there’s no way Goldstein could have known about that. As far as the claims Marcotte really did make, Goldstein’s language is impressive but vague. He’s kind enough to clarify in the comments, though, and then he’s clearly wrong. [3]

Anyway, the important thing is the ultimate intentions of Marcotte and her social constructivist red army, which are “to seize political control by seizing control of how ‘meaning’ is determined.” It’s “a clear indication that the institutionalization of ‘response’ theoretics has progressed to the point where we must, indeed, either fight back or else become subsumed by interest groups bent on controlling ‘meaning’ by purely rhetorical force.” Goldstein is a formidable rhetorical warrior. Nobody is working harder to keep the world safe from the insidious spread of pernicious literary theoretics than he is.

He’s also an intellectual fraud, a billowing gasbag of pedantry, hypocrisy, and self-pity, and the perfect poster boy for the puffed-up but ultimately hollow cult of superior intelligence. I wouldn’t be at all surprised or bothered to find out that his IQ is quite high — it would just be more evidence of how little the number tells you about the quality of the product.

NOTES

1. ^ It’s not just because he gets the fundamental biological fact right that Rich Rostrum’s comment stands out. There’s also a tone of actual curiosity, as if there might be something of interest other than the partisan implications.

   I’m not sure there is a “reproductive instinct”. There are instincts and drives to engage in behaviors which lead to reproduction, and to care for young, but the process is too long and indirect to be reflected in a “drive”. Animals mate and produce young - but do they _know_ that mating leads to offspring? I don’t think so.

   As far as I know, only humans are capable of performing actions in conscious expectation of results that will not occur for a long time (such as planting seeds to grow food to be eaten several months in the future). I don’t see how such awareness could drive the development of an “instinct”, though it can certainly combine with the desire to care for children. Note that people will make very strong efforts to obtain adoptive children, even when those children are of a different race and thus not possibly the adopter’s genetic offspring.

   It’s not that case, by the way, that every other comment is the kind of pure strident stupidity that I excerpted in the post. As usual with comment threads, there are lots of tangents. I see the redoubtable Amac in there — a person who’s quite capable of calling out nonsense, but here he’s one of the tangents. There are also a couple of smart comments at the end that came in months later and weren’t part of the discussion/celebration.

2. ^ The most polemical parts of Marcotte’s piece, to my mind, are when she makes these cultural constructs sound like conspiracies, writing things like, “culturally constructed differences… exist to demean and oppress women” and “the mythological ‘biological clock’” is essentially “an effort to Other women” (my emphasis).

   It may or may not matter that she doesn’t include parenting with biology, and that’s the basic problem — who knows? Parenting is a very complex, long-term, and subtle thing, especially compared to sex, and I don’t see how the urges that guide us to raise our offspring (and guide our offspring to make sure they’re raised) could be so precisely targeted that they don’t have spillover effects. The fact that people choose to adopt and it works out is pretty good evidence of that. And when it comes to possible differences in the reproduction-related urges of the two sexes, the mammaries loom large.

   In spite of what Thompson and all the rest of them think, it’s clear from Marcotte’s blogging that she has an active interest in science and she’s fairly well informed. She identifies herself as a skeptic, too, so she regularly argues for evidence-based ideas and against faith-based ideas, and does it fairly well from what I’ve seen. I have the feeling, though, that the conspiratorial patriarchy is represents a faith-based core of feminist ideology that she hasn’t (or at least hadn’t) managed to confront. The process of social construction is surely more organic and more interesting than that. That’s how it seems to me, anyway, based on the diverse social systems of non-human primates and the work of feminist biologists like Sarah Hrdy.

   One symptom of Marcotte’s polemical thinking is indifference or intolerance of the inconvenient experience of other women. This was extreme in the wake of Marcotte’s notoriously vehement comments about the Duke lacrosse case. She was apparently unwilling to tolerate even respectful disagreement from other feminists, including one from Duke. The local perspective in a situation like that is more than just another opinion, and a commentator working from a distance needs to be open to it. It’s not the last word, but it’s the voice of experience and it usually complicates the picture. Marcotte, it seems, preferred to keep it simple.

   In the much less charged context of her “octo-mom” post, Marcotte is of course much more understanding. She acknowledges that some women experience a strong urge to have children and she wants to reassure them that she believes their feelings are “real.” Nonetheless, the way Marcotte sees it, these women have internalized a system that’s designed to demean and oppress them. It seems kind of patronizing, doesn’t it? This is a realm where a whole lot can be guessed but very little is known. There is no evidence-based explanation for the feelings those women have. The truly skeptical approach to the situation is to respect the unknown. The polemical approach is to collapse it down to a line of defense.

3. ^ This, from Goldstein’s post, is Darleen Click’s “gotcha” after he’s bloated it up with pseudo-erudition:

   Deconstructing — and so re-conceptualizing — the “social construct” that Amanda suggests was built up by patriarchal forces to trick women into thinking the desire to procreate and “mother” is a biological imperative is, to her way of thinking, good. Re-conceptualizing the “social construct” that tricks homosexuals or the transgendered into thinking that their behavior is biologically driven, on the other hand, is reductive, evil, and Christianist.

   In short, she wants to have it both ways — and she wants this precisely because it puts her in charge of deciding for everyone else what is right and what is wrong, socially speaking.

   He does manage to identify a desire to “mother” as one the things that Marcotte is writing off as a social construct. I don’t see why the word is quoted, though — a desire to mother seems like a pretty good guess about where that urge to have a baby comes from. It’s probably just verbal filigree (thus the quotes), since it goes with a “desire to procreate,” which is another version of the pseudoscientific thing that doesn’t exist.

   Responding to a reader, he summarizes his take on Marcotte’s position more clearly, and he manages to be more clearly and totally wrong, both about evolution and Marcotte. The puppeteering is shameless, too. In the post, it’s the fabricating of her supposed position on homosexuality and “she wants to have it both ways — and she wants this precisely because….” Then in the comment it’s, “when pressured, it becomes obvious that Amanda would change her tune….” It become even more obvious that Goldstein is spouting pure bullshit.

   What Amanda is saying is that the evolutionary imperative to reproduce doesn’t really exist — that it is social construct. It is REAL, she concedes, but real as a SOCIAL CONSTRUCT, and so adaptable to change by human will alone. In a sense, this is true: we can often constrain our biological insticts by way of agreed upon social contracts, and so create social constructs to militate against biological norms.

   But that’s not what Amanda means. Instead, she is arguing that there are no biological imperatives, only social constructs that act AS IF they were biological imperatives.

   This is nonsense, and as both Darleen and I (and others) noted, when pressured, it becomes obvious that Amanda would change her tune with respect to other biological imperatives as it suits her political needs.

In one sentence the ACLU’s demands that unsavory techniques be banned from questioning suspected terrorists. In another, the ACLU urges putting the feet of the President of the United States into a flame to force him—torture him, if necessary—to do what they want.

Interesting, huh!?

This came to my attention because of President-elect Obama’s interview with George Stephanopoulos yesterday. In one section, George asked about that pledge—the one the ACLU is willing to betray its core civil libertarian values to make him live up to—to close Guantánamo. [my emphasis]

So, if the ACLU turns up the heat—maybe they’ll target Obama with another searing ad in the New York Times, but there’s no telling what extremes they’ll go to—it’ll be (yet more) proof that the ACLU is a quivering mass of hypocrisy, perfectly comfortable with torture when it suits their purposes. Don’t worry about Obama, though. He’ll already have his nose to the grindstone (the way the shit’s gonna hit the fan, it might be a blessing in disguise). I doubt he’ll even notice the hot feet.

According to his biographical blurb, “Rich Galen has been described as ‘what you get when you cross a political hack with a philosopher.’” I don’t know about philosopher, but he’s a hack, for sure. A hack with a self-deprecating sense of humor—the piece I just quoted starts with a personal anecdote that’s amusing enough. But if that nonsense about feet to the fire is meant as a joke I can’t find the wink.

I’m stumped as to why Galen would make such an inane claim. I don’t actually believe that the explanation is that he’s stupid, though he may think that his readers are. His editorials also run on Townhall.com, and the general feeling in the comment thread there is that it’s not possible to overstate the perfidy and ignorance of the ACLU. Within that worldview, one commenter manages to turn Galen’s point into something that sounds vaguely rational:

“Feet to the fire” is obviously a figure of speech but its not an idle threat when it comes to the lengths the ACLU will be willing to go to get what they want.

Right after the election I listed a few of the wacky paranoid theories that were circulating in what what Michael Bérubé recently dubbed (“politely”) the “low-information conservative constituency.” Here’s one I hadn’t seen before, from Galen’s comment thread. Scotch Indian “would not be shocked to see [Obama] pass an amendment so he can run for more than two terms.” Not so fast, replies wbheff—“he might not even bother to ‘pass an amendment’.”

Barack Hussein Obama, President for Life. Those folks have really got his number. Once he’s sworn in on Lincoln’s Koran, just hours from now, all bets are off.

Some of my favorite bloggers have found a new font of conservative self-parody—Big Hollywood. I might as well bandwagon along for a minute. There’s a choice post over there written by Evan Sayet, “simply the best political comedian working in America today,” according to FrontPage entertainment critic David Horowitz. Sayet doesn’t waste any humor on his “unified field theory” of a comic-book menace called “Modern Liberalism,” though. He’s not just a stand-up guy, he’s a Thinker, and he starts his think-piece on Bruce Springsteen with some intellectual heavy hitters.

The “culture war” that we hear so much about is, to borrow Thomas Sowell’s phrase, a “conflict of visions.” Visions, Sowell explains, go deeper than mere policy—in fact they are the font of where we stand on the issues—and they are founded on some of the most basic and fundamental beliefs the individual holds about the nature of man and, in turn, the role and purpose of government, family, religion and all other influential forces that society has evolved. Sowell called the conflicting visions the “Constrained” and the “Unconstrained” and offered Jean Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith as primary examples of the visions in conflict. More contemporary examples are John Lennon and Bruce Springsteen, the former holding the “unconstrained” vision (which I call here the Neo-Liberal view), the latter the “constrained,” or, in my term, Conservative take. Just to be clear, yes, I’m saying that, while Springsteen the multimillionaire, rock star with the mansion in Beverly Hills may be a Liberal, Bruce Springsteen the poet is one-hundred percent Republican.

Sowell recognizes that, at its most basic level, this conflict of visions revolves around what one believes to be man’s innate nature. Is it, as the Neo-Liberal believes, that man is born good and then corrupted by the institutions of society or, do the Conservatives have it right and man is born with a dual and conflicting nature—capable of good and evil and everything in between—requiring cultural forces to help him tamp down the darker side and cultivate the good within?

I think it’s safe to say that Sayet is a Springsteen fan, though he never says so outright. He admires Springsteen’s lyrics for what looks to him like a conservative vision of humanity, but that vision seems to be at odds with Springsteen’s “Neo-Liberal” politics. So far so good—some very fine criticism has started with that sort of realization. But the disconnect could be Springsteen’s doing, or it could be a sign that Sayet hasn’t got the “Modern Liberal” thing as totally figured out as he thinks. Is his one-dimensional test really such a foolproof way to sort the “Conservatives” from the “Neo-Liberals”? Is Springsteen’s all-American working-class liberal mindset really captured by a second-hand cliché from 18th-century France? Those are two obvious questions he might have asked, and I’d say the answers are no and no. But if Sayet knows anything, he knows right from wrong. The only way to solve the puzzle is to split Springsteen down the middle. His right half—the one with all the poetic vision—is one-hundred percent Republican. His left side—the Beverly Hills liberal poser—is clueless about what the other half is doing. That’s not the same as a half-and-half blend of “Conservative” and “Neo-Liberal.” That would be like a cross between an elephant and a donkey, and what could come out of such an encounter but a bloody mess?

Maybe Sayet meticulously questioned all his assumptions before he settled on his Dr-Jekyll-and-Mr-Hyde theory of the Boss. I doubt it, though. There are no signs in the article of a reflective, self-critical mind at work. He spends most of the piece cherry-picking the conservative message from songs like “Thunder Road” and “Long Walk Home.” The lyrics never stood a chance. Sayet’s interpretive efforts got the full treatment from performance critic Scott Eric Kaufman. As usual, the show is entertaining and educational.

Speaking of Thomas Sowell and cherry picking, I noticed when I was on Townhall.com that, like Galen, Sowell is a regular columnist there. Now I can see why he appeals to Evan Sayet. The piece of Sowell’s that caught my eye is titled “‘Intellectuals’”. As you can probably guess from the scare quotes, the word is used scornfully throughout. You might think that’s an odd thing for Sowell to do—with a PhD in Economics from Chicago, a raft of books authored, and a high-profile position at a major think tank, what is Sowell if not an intellectual? But in this little piece of mindless pandering he earns his share of the scorn that he pours indiscriminately on his class. I guess that counts as practicing what he preaches.

“‘Intellectuals’” is a reaction to a New York Times column—Nicholas Kristoff wondering if Obama’s success is a “step away from the anti-intellectualism that has long been a strain in American life.” Sowell found it “hard to know whether to laugh or cry” about what he seems to have read as a rose-colored paean to intellectuals and intellectualism in politics (that’s not what it is, but never mind). To put Kristoff in his place, Sowell leans unimaginatively on the old trope about how superior common sense is to book learnin’. I think what he has in mind, really, is left-wing book learnin’. He jumps from a few specific cases of leftist intellectuals getting things hopelessly wrong—they’re not hard to find—to this gross generalization:

It would be no feat to fill a big book with all the things on which intellectuals were grossly mistaken, just in the 20th century—far more so than ordinary people.

RIght after that passage he paraphrases William F. Buckley’s far more incisive way of making more or less the same point—Buckley famously said that he’d rather be governed by some regular folks from the Boston phone book (“the first two thousand names,” according to Wikiquote) than by the Harvard faculty. I wouldn’t want to be governed by the Harvard faculty either, so I guess Buckley had a point. Whether those “regular” folks who have gone through life getting called first for everything would be better, I’m not sure. The choice that Buckley offers doesn’t bear close examination, but the message is clear and memorable, and that counts for a lot. On the other hand, Sowell’s book (The Complete Idiot’s Feel-Good Guide to Dangerously Misguided Intellectuals and the Ordinary People Who Could Have Set Them Straight) could be written and written and written again. Playing a game of mix-and-match with “intellectuals,” “ordinary people” (whoever they are), and “things,” you could tell just about any story you wanted to. (Back in September, Roger Kimball explained Buckley’s zinger in multisyllabic and historic detail and then patted himself on the back for his slavish devotion to the caricature and his Buckleyesque enthusiasm for Sarah Palin, the “cruise missile aimed from Middle America” at the intelligentsia. Roger Kimball, there’s Buckley’s true heir. Screw the low-life son.)

Just for fun, let’s look at how intellectuals and ordinary people have scored on some recent controversial things. I’ll starting with Barack Obama. We don’t actually know how things will turn out with him, so I can’t score anyone. What I can say is that it will be hard to score. Some ordinary people seem to think he can walk on water. Others figure he’ll trample the constitution and make it impossible to buy an American flag. I checked in with some of that latter group earlier in this post, by way of a Townhall.com comment thread. They are much more likely Sowell readers than the Obama enthusiasts, and in “‘Intellectuals’,” Sowell effectively blesses their petty anti-intellectual prejudice. It’s not the most contemptible performance like that I’ve seen, but it’s nothing to brag about.

How about the global financial meltdown? I think that’s still pretty fresh in everyone’s memory. It seems to have caught most of the experts with their pants down. Are experts the same as intellectuals? Some of them must be, and almost all “experts” are “intellectuals.” As to ordinary people, thank goodness they knew enough to avoid dodgy mortgages they couldn’t afford or a whole lot of them would be up shit creek now without paddles (but with lots of intellectuals, and in a pinch, you know… it just might work). And not so long ago, the U.S. invasion of Iraq was another thing. Some of the neocons around Rumsfeld, guys like Wolfowitz, had intellectual pretensions and advanced degrees, and true to form, they had it figured woefully, criminally wrong. Now the liberal intelligentsia kept saying “Don’t do it! Don’t do it!”, but like they say, even a stopped clock is right twice a day. As for ordinary people…

(photo: Shawn Duffy)

It so happens that Tenured Radical just put up something about Obama and “The Return of Educated People.” so there’s another favorite blogger to add to the mix. She even included a YouTube clip of Bruce Springsteen and Pete Seeger singing “This Land is Your Land.” Unfortunately “the video has been removed by the user.” I found another clip of the same performances.

You know that it’s only a matter of time before we’re all singing “Kum bah yah” like pod people. Maybe the least we can do for the other side is to chip in for liquor and anti-depressants.

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.

Back in August Johnson posted his thoughts about “The Unusual Hashmi Case”. A 2003 graduate of Brooklyn College, where Johnson is on the faculty, Syed Fahad Hashmi is being held on charges of providing material assistance to Al Queda. But the focus of the post isn’t Hashmi’s situation, it’s the efforts of two of his former instructors to protest the conditions of his detention, pursued under the banner Educators for Civil Liberties. It’s too bad that people who organize these fights against injustice are drawn to expansive names like that. The Organization for Truth and Fairness from the lacrosse case is a classic of the genre. Hashmi’s supporters weren’t that grandiose, but one case, no matter how serious, is not a surrogate for the whole realm of civil liberties.

A petition is central to the effort, and I have to admit I cringe at the thought of another statement of concern making the faculty rounds—the Support Bill Ayers petition I mentioned in the last post shows how strong the bandwagon effect can be with those things. The one for Hashmi is quite a bit more focussed and substantive, though. The main issue is the special administrative measures dictating that he’s to be held in solitary confinement and severely restricting his communication with anyone, including his attorney. The petitioners believe these measures are excessive and unnecessary and should be lifted.

Johnson has nothing good to say about the undertaking, but he’s particularly hard on “[the] commentary about the case’s possible effects on free speech and the academy” from Hashmi’s former instructors. I don’t have the background to fully judge the legal issues, but it seems to me that Johnson’s most convincing point is about how constitutionally protected speech and associations are valid evidence of a defendant’s “state of mind.” And in general the petitioners’ claims are more speculative and probably weaker as they turn from Hashmi’s plight to the chilling effects of the case on activists or in the classroom. According to Johnson, this amounts to “cross[ing] over from one-sided to merely bizarre.” That’s overstating the problem quite a bit. In fact, it strikes me as a better characterization of Johnson’s attack on the petitioners.

The first version of Johnson’s post is as one-sided as anything Hashmi’s supporters produced, and it’s no credit to Cliopatria, the high-minded blog for academic historians where it was posted. Like the Ayers/Khalidi piece I wrote about last time, a rewritten and expanded version appeared on Durham-in-Wonderland (DIW), Johnson’s blog about the lacrosse case. In this case the time lag was much longer, the extent of the changes much greater. The result is much more narrow-minded and polemical, so it fits right in on DIW.

It seems like some of the legal issues that Johnson has been so insistent about in his analysis of the lacrosse case would carry over. The two cases are quite different, and I’m not suggesting that he should necessarily have approached the Hashmi case with exactly the same attitude and exactly the same issues as he brought to the lacrosse case. But terrorism, like sexual assault, demands a difficult balancing act from the justice system, one that’s vulnerable to political manipulation and abuse. Something could be made of the parallels, I’m sure. For Johnson, though, the only connections worth making are in the realm of the academic culture crusade. It seems that his approach to the legal issues in the Hashmi case is largely determined by the professors he’s attacking—what they stand for, he opposes. In his view, the fact that the claims of the two organizers have been endorsed by so many other professors, “says more about the rush-to-judgment attitude of the academy than any violations of civil liberties by the government.” That rush-to-judgment attitude is at the heart of Johnson’s case against the Duke faculty, and what really ties Hashmi’s petition to the obsessions that drive DIW is that, among the signatures, Johnson found “no fewer than eleven members of the Group of 88” (as always, the “Group” is where the action is). The table-thumping rhetoric is a DIW staple—if only Johnson could brandish a sheaf of papers the demagogic effect would be complete. [Here’s what Johnson has to say about the differences between the Cliopatria and DIW posts.]

I’ve picked out a few of the highlights (or lowlights)—unless noted, quotes are from the DIW post. Besides Johnson’s own “rush-to-judgment attitude” towards the charges against Hashmi, what’s striking about the critique is how primitive a lot of it is. He’s a remarkable specimen, though—an anti-intellectual intellectual who assumes that the people he’s criticizing are as shallow and monomaniacal as he is.

• Rushing to judgment is a no-no… except when it gives your argument more rhetorical bite. Berating and denouncing guilt-presuming professors is a major preoccupation on DIW, but apparently the standard that applies to comments about the Duke lacrosse players doesn’t extend to Hashmi:

  In 2006, a former Brooklyn College(!) student named Syed Fahad Hashmi was arrested in Britain on charges of providing material assistance to Al Qaeda. At the time of his arrest, Hashmi sought to travel to Pakistan, carrying with [him] such items as a large amount of cash, night vision goggles, and sundry military apparel. Hashmi is currently awaiting trial in the United States, which is holding him without bail.

  These incriminating details, which weren’t in the Cliopatria post, make the case against Hashmi sound quite strong—it’s hard to imagine why anyone would be taking piles of cash and night vision goggles to Pakistan except to help terrorists. Johnson’s sources don’t inspire much confidence, though. His first link is to an MSNBC article that cites, first, “a terrorism expert and NBC News analyst” and then “Law enforcement sources.” The information about the goggles is “based on a USA TODAY review of public records and reports from Justice, Commerce and the Pentagon.” Wasn’t one of the lessons of the lacrosse case that sources like this should be treated with a healthy dose of skepticism, since prosecutors and investigators are known to overstate their case, and “Experts can have agendas, too”?

  Johnson seems to have some reservations about the case against Hashmi:

  Given the Bush administration’s record on civil liberties in terrorism-related cases, it’s possible to believe that Hashmi has suffered improperly. […]

  The Chronicle of Higher Education, a non-partisan, non-ideological journal that covers college and university issues, produced an article that appropriately described the case against Hashmi as “murky.”

  Commenter “One Spook” objects that “the prosecution has said very little about its case,” which “could very well mean that it is quite strong.” In response, Johnson backpedals:

  I agree with you completely. By “appropriately murky,” I only meant to say that the facts known publicly—facts largely, as you point out, framed by the defense—don’t point to any clear case of either civil liberties violations or likely innocence.

  That’s a strange claim to make after presenting the essence of the government’s case as unqualified fact. The Chronicle article by Allie Grasgreen is more detailed and more circumspect (It’s no longer available for free at the magazine’s web site, but here’s a pdf). Though she was only able to interview Hashmi’s attorney (the U.S. Attorney’s Office declined to comment), there’s no imbalance of “facts largely… framed by the defense.” What Grasgreen describes as “murky,” anyway, is the government’s allegations.

  The details in the indictment against Mr. Hashmi are murky. Among the four counts are allegations that he conspired with unnamed persons to provide “material support or resources”—including money and military gear—to co-conspirators who delivered the materials to Al Qaeda members in Pakistan. The materials were to be used by Al Qaeda against U.S. forces in Afghanistan, the indictment says.

• Expect self-serving spin from a defense brief… except when the defense is arguing for your team.

  [P]olitical science professor Jeanne Theoharis, the statement’s author, has said that the signatories take no position on the merits of Hashmi’s guilt or innocence. Yet their petition and the remarks of the petition’s two chief sponsors (Theoharis and political science professor Corey Robin) read as if cribbed from a defense brief.

  That’s from Cliopatria—maybe even Johnson realized that DIW was not the place to scoff at someone else for sounding like a defense brief. As I already pointed out, there’s never been much critical distance between him and the various legal teams that have represented lacrosse players, not even after the action moved from criminal to civil proceedings. My impression is that Until Proven Innocent is the same—just scan the source notes for “Joe Cheshire interview,” “Jim Cooney interview”, and “Brad Bannon interview.”

  In December 2006, the defense’s request to change the trial venue for the three indicted students was, for Johnson, “yet another in a string of extraordinary defense motions.” A few days later he noted that he knew of “no other criminal case in which the statements and behavior of the students’ own professors constituted grounds for a change of venue.” He wrote more or less the same thing eight months later, but framed it more dramatically as “the first time in American history,” and he’s cited the motion on other occasions as damning evidence against the “listening” statement and its endorsers. But it was never considered in court, and it seems like even a sympathetic critic should be able to treat a defense motion as something less than an automatic slam dunk, even if it makes a compelling case (and this one does, on the back of Mike Nifong much more than the Duke faculty, though).

  More recently, with his Obama-partisan hat on, Johnson analyzed a 30-page motion from the defense as if it was the judge’s ruling in their favor, and more importantly, against Sarah Palin’s flunkies in the Alaska state legislature (it was a “Troopergate” thing). Scott Eric Kaufman should know better than to trust what Johnson says about his own sources, but the opportunity to really stick it to Gov. Palin was too good to pass up, and he let himself be fooled into posting “second-class, legally-mandated snark” instead of “first-rate, smack-down snark.”

• In the mind of the simple-minded extremists at Duke, guilt and due process are mutually exclusive. The name of one of those extremists, it seems, is so full of significance that it can stand as a complete sentence:

  Wahneema Lubiano. Her authorship of the guilt-presuming Group of 88 statement (something “happened” to Crystal Mangum; “thank you” to protesters carrying “castrate” signs; the signatories would hold firm “regardless of what the police say or the court decides”) didn’t exactly identify her as a friend of civil liberties.

  Based on their attitudes and actions since 2006, Lubiano and her Group colleagues would be about the last people expected to stand up for due process or the rights of the accused.

  Whether the “Group of 88 statement” (the “listening” statement, that is) is really “guilt-presuming” is a matter of opinion. But granting that it is for the sake of argument, how does a “guilt-presuming” statement that makes no legal demands and carries no legal authority automatically imply a position on civil liberties? It’s possible to believe someone is guilty of a crime and also entitled to due process. I imagine that in the right circumstances, even Johnson is capable of the mental gymnastics it takes to hold onto both ideas at once—lawyers have to do it all the time, don’t they? (The phrase “regardless of what the police say or the court decides” has nothing to do with the students’ civil liberties unless it was the prevalence of racism and sexism at Duke that the police were investigating.)

  Just as he assumes that Rashid Khalidi’s favoritism towards Arab-American students is categorical, Johnson assumes that Lubiano’s antipathy to the lacrosse players is all-encompassing. And it does seem like an extremist should have simplistic, unbalanced opinions, though assuming that the person under scrutiny is an extremist and therefore one-dimensional is about as superficial as a critic can get. If Johnson is taking such a superficial approach it would explain why he’s so confident that Lubiano’s agenda was tied to guilty verdicts being handed down in the lacrosse case and that Khalidi would have joined the “Group of 88” had he been at Duke. It’s easy to guess what simple people are thinking and what they’ll do, and if they’re black women it seems to be especially easy. Perhaps the assumption is that, unless there’s unambiguous evidence to the contrary, they’re in the grip of mindless identity politics—a principle that could easily be extended to Palestinians, as well.

• When criticizing extremist ideologues and other wrong-headed types, insist on simple-minded, slavish consistency. To some extent, this is a corollary to the last point—simple-minded extremists should be both predictable and consistent.

  The “attitudes and actions since 2006” of “Lubiano and her Group colleagues,” are in response to one outrageous incident. Why is it that they “would be about the last people expected to stand up for due process or the rights of the accused”? I agree that, on the whole, the professors he’s referring to weren’t concerned about due process when they should have been. But most people pick and choose when to get worked up about such things—just look at Johnson’s reaction to the Hashmi case. Nonetheless he acts as if the commitment of these Duke professors to due process is summed up by their attitude towards the one case he happens to have written 1200 or so posts and a book about. To sign the Hashmi petition, they must have “suddenly discovered civil liberties.” It’s a claim full of forced sarcasm, so it may be giving Johnson too much credit to treat it as something he’s actually thought through. But consider this (and while you’re at it, note the effect of sneer quotes in the abbreviation he uses for Hashmi’s petitioners):

  According to the “Educators,” Hashmi’s civil liberties also have been violated because “under a plea agreement reported in the media, [alleged Hashmi confederate Junaid] Babar will receive a reduced sentence in return for his cooperation.”

  … [I]t’s possible… that Babar is lying. But it’s very strange indeed to claim that all testimony obtained as a result of a plea bargain automatically violates the civil liberties of a suspect. If the “Educators” really believe this point, however, perhaps they should petition the court to overturn convictions of such figures as Martha Stewart, Enron executives, or WorldCom executives. After all, each of those cases (like the Hashmi case) involved testimony obtained from plea bargains.

  The suggestion that the “Educators” really ought to take up the cause of a bunch of white-collar convicts they presumably find odious is as ridiculous as it is obnoxious, but it has no bite. The dull-witted assumption behind it is that there are no meaningful distinctions to be made between the various cases—as far as Johnson is concerned, apparently, a plea bargain is a plea bargain is a plea bargain (and it does seem like he’s letting the label do his thinking for him). Offhand I can think of two reasons why it’s likely to raise more concerns in Hashmi’s case than in the other ones Johnson dredged up. First of all, it’s likely than the government had more leverage over Babar, so he faced a starker choice. Second, the restrictions on Hashmi’s defense may make it hard for him to challenge Babar’s testimony. And I’m confident that the plea bargains in the three white-collar cases were challenged vigorously in court. Here’s a little snippet from CNN’s coverage of the Martha Stewart trial (Douglas Faneuil was the guy who copped a plea):

  The stockbroker’s defense attorney, David Alfel (ph), then began his assault on Faneuil. The 28-year-old admitted to using drugs, including marijuana, cocaine and ecstasy. Faneuil also told the jury about his plea bargain for having lied to government investigators.

  Will Hashmi’s defense be able to level an “assault” on Babar’s credibility? Likely not, it seems to me, though of course I can only speculate.

  Along the same lines, Johnson “assume[s] that each of the signatories is committed to advocating the repeal of all hate crimes laws.” If not, their objection to the government’s use of constitutionally protected speech and association is inconsistent. And he’s incredulous because Tim Shortell, a hot-headed Brooklyn College professor who once called religious people “moral retards,” had signed on to support Hashmi. Apparently a moment of rhetorical excess at the expense of religion disqualifies the man from sincerely caring about either the civil liberties or the suffering of a religious person. The model of human thought and behavior at work here has been liberated from any trace of subtlety. It has very little to do with the real world, but on the plus side the criticism must be incredibly easy to write.

It’s depressing to see this stuff treated as intelligent criticism, and there’s plenty more where it came from. Even smart and educated people seem to approach the culture war with a tribalistic mindset, though, which means that it will always have a receptive audience, inside and outside academia.

It’s ironic that Johnson takes the time to describe the Chronicle of Higher Education as a “non-partisan, non-ideological journal” and then ignores the non-partisan and non-ideological message, except for the one detail that he misrepresents. I think the author of the Chronicle article is appropriately skeptical of the various claims from all sides, but in the end she doesn’t leave the impression that the case warrants such a dismissive attitude.

This part sums up the underlying dilemma, as I see it, pretty well:

Chris Zambelis works as a political analyst on Middle East issues for Helios Global, a Washington-based risk-analysis firm. Mr. Zambelis wrote about Mr. Hashmi’s arrest in 2006 for Global Terrorism Analysis, a newsletter published by the Jamestown Foundation, and he says “there’s no doubt” the government’s actions against Mr. Hashmi, including the special administrative measures, are completely warranted if the allegations involving Al Qaeda are true. But, he reiterated, that’s a big “if.”

“If you want to give the government the benefit of the doubt on this, if there is something substantive that they’ve found that they want to pursue, obviously they are right in holding onto him,” Mr. Zambelis said. “At the same time, there are a lot of mistakes and a lot of people get brought in and roped into these plots, and it turns out they had nothing to do with them.”

I think it’s foolish to come to any firm conclusion about a case like this from news reports—the murk is just too thick. Most of us will either go with our gut reaction to the superficial information available to us or take the lead of an expert we find credible (which, I have to admit, sometimes amounts to pretty much the same thing). Zambelis strikes me as credible—he at least seems to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time, which is a major asset in my book. The extreme measures being taken against Hashmi while he’s awaiting trial are a separate issue. In that department, Michael Ratner (president of the Center for Constitutional Rights) carries some weight—in the Chronicle article, he describes Hashmi’s treatment as “incredible” and “outrageous.”

Johnson nonetheless finds “no items in the Chronicle article, the few other publications on the case, or any public statements by the signatories point to even one specific violation of Hashmi’s civil liberties.” Given how tightly held the details of the case are, I’m not sure what could be produced that he would find convincing. Johnson grants that “it’s possible to believe that Hashmi has suffered improperly,” and if so he’s suffered far more from it than the lacrosse players did and has much less recourse. Maybe all of this adds up to a coherent, principled stand, but I can’t make it out.

As I wrote this post, I was curious whether there have been any new developments in the case. Apparently not, but I did come up with a couple of heated opinion pieces about the case from Nat Hentoff. Near the end of his DIW post, Johnson makes a sarcastic reference to the “born-again civil libertarians” from Duke who signed Hashmi’s petition. Johnson seems to be a bit of a fair-weather civil libertarian, himself. Hentoff, on the other hand, seems to be the genuine article. It’s instructive to see how he works through some of the issues surrounding Rashid Khalidi, too.

CODA

The DIW post that went up right after I wrote this post has a variation on a plea bargain is a plea bargain is a plea bargain. “Crime & Punishment” is about Michael Burch, charged with the Feb. 2007 rape of a Duke student and recently charged with another rape allegedly committed while he’s been out on bail. An ugly situation, and it seems likely that some of the authorities handling the case didn’t do their jobs very well—the judge who set Burch’s bail at $50K, for instance.

But, as Johnson said in response to my previous post, “DIW is a blog about the lacrosse case and its effects,” a place to “focus on the lacrosse case angle.” He does that to the max in response to Burch’s rearrest. In his post, he lists the differences between the way justice officials and Duke faculty and administration reacted to the allegations against Burch and the way they reacted to the allegations against the lacrosse team. That involves rehashing the horrific record of Duke and Durham in some detail, with special attention to the indictments against the faculty. Johnson doesn’t theorize about why the reactions were different, except by implication. The difference that’s obviously significant is that in the Burch incident the accuser is white and the accused is black. No other differences—between the circumstances or the charges or the evidence or whatever—are treated as significant when considering the differences in the way the cases were handled. So, although DIW is all about how Duke and Durham did most everything wrong after the lacrosse incident, they still should have done exactly the same thing in response to this other incident. Divergences aren’t evidence of better (or worse) judgment or of different circumstances, they’re evidence of double standards. Because a rape allegation is a rape allegation is a rape allegation. Or maybe it’s only interracial rape allegations that are like that.

There are, I’m sure, valid and illuminating comparisons between the two rape allegations and their aftermath. Quite likely they highlight, among other things, how badly the lacrosse incident was handled. The grim reappearance of Burch in the news could be a fine chance for reflection on a lacrosse-case blog, but DIW is too mired in mindless but smug tribalism to pull anything of value from it. Another recent entry—“Amazing”—is a showpiece of rampant tribalism. It turns out that Bob Steel, chairman of Duke’s board of trustees, invested in the movie being made from Tim Tyson’s book Blood Done Sign My Name. I think there are quite reasonable criticisms of both men for their behavior during the lacrosse scandal—I’ve expressed my own reservations about some of the things Tyson has said. But true to his word, Johnson looks at the investment through the pinhole of lacrosse-case tunnel vision. The bulk of his entry is parallel instances of one of his classic rhetorical formulas, good for prosecuting, crusading, witch hunting, and other special demagogic occasions—“the same Bob Steel who…” and “the same Tim Tyson who…,” each followed by the sins of the man enumerated. The transaction, on DIW, has nothing to do with a book or the incident it’s based on or a movie-in-progress, and the two men involved are nothing more than the ugly characters revealed by the scandal. It’s a great way to nurse a grudge.

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.

…the rise of what I call “postmodern conservatism”—how an almost poststructuralist embrace of diversity and criticism of universal values informs the wars against “objectivity” and the mainstream media, the dominance of evolution and the call to teach intelligent design (ID) in public schools, and David Horowitz’s struggle for a student bill of rights in higher education.

The idea of “intellectual diversity” is a classic of postmodern conservatism (for those who don’t like their conservatism quite so postmodernized, it’s “intellectual pluralism”). It’s a slippery concept that’s inspired plenty of heated and arcane debates—to get a feel for them, go Fish. Based on what I’ve seen—a fairly haphazard sample—“intellectual diversity” is mostly used as a pretentious euphemism for “political diversity,” something that’s a lot like cultural diversity. If smart, educated, and decent people can come from a wide range of races and cultures, then it seems reasonable to say they can come from the different political persuasions as well. I’m not sure how many people really believe that, in their heart of hearts, and the relativism is sure ironic coming from the conservative side. But there’s some merit in the idea, I think. Cloistered orthodoxy and petty intolerance are endemic to academia, and the tendencies are only encouraged by too much homogeneity. A while back I pointed out a couple of professors whose contributions are tied to the way they stand out as conservatives against a background that’s largely liberal.

Positive examples are especially illuminating because intellectual diversity is usually promoted by highlighting the negatives its supposed to fix—the outrages of liberal bias and political correctness. In fact, it seems to me that one of the better arguments against intellectual diversity as a reform agenda is the poor quality of the polemics launched by some of its promoters and fans. When high-minded ideals are coupled with low-minded rhetoric and feeble, agenda-driven reasoning, it’s the practice that reveals the intentions and integrity of the critic far more than the preaching. David Thompson is a peripheral example, KC Johnson a more central one. What the practice suggests is that an ideologically balanced campus would be like one of those TV shows where liberal and conservative pundits try to shout each other down. It’s a mindset that offers nothing of value to academia’s pool of intellectual diversity.

In his column in the Cornell Daily Sun, Gabriel Arana criticises conservatives on his campus for dwelling on denounciation and symbolic resistance to what they see as the dominant culture instead of offering intellectually engaged alternatives. (hat tip)

In this sense The Cornell Review and the conservative discourse it represents owe more to Ann Coulter than William F. Buckley; the discourse is polemical, a tired repetition of conservative mantras attacking a liberal campus culture. If the Veritas grant does anything, I hope it will be to invigorate conservative discourse that has—at least during my time here—failed to really engage the intellectual community here, to bring to light new opinions that do not simply recapitulate conservative pundits’ talking points. Perhaps it can start by refraining from attacking our faculty and students and propose something to talk about.

The editorial was in response to the announcement of a $50k grant from the Veritas Fund for Higher Education to help launch Cornell’s new Program on Freedom and Free Societies. Arana’s objections aren’t with the program, they’re with the rhetoric coming from the Fund’s executive director, David DeRosiers. And he isn’t alone—even the Program’s point man on campus, Prof. Barry Strauss, distanced himself from DeRosiers’ rhetoric (“…I wish they had consulted me about their summer update. I would have told them that I respectfully disagree with much of what they say.”). Here’s a sample:

Veritas identified Cornell as one such university that prides itself on diversity, but lacks the intellectual kind, stating in its update, “most new courses of the last several decades have focused entirely on race, gender, or postmodernism.” Cornell, over the last forty years, has neglected traditional learning offerings such as Western society, thought and economics, according to the statement.

“The idea behind what we’re doing is to bring back triumphalism to moderate the excesses of gender and [diversity courses],” said DeRosiers. “To teach courses that have gone out of style. They have had a focus on race, gender, class—and in doing so, students have been given a partial view of reality with America as the force of many evils. It’s more to the fact that they’re only receiving a diet of such things—they’re being malnourished.”

According to Arana, the sweeping claims about the curriculum are easily rebutted by Cornell’s course catalog. That’s small potatoes, though, compared to the apparent determination to fight excess with excess by “bring[ing] back triumphalism.” Triumphalism? I can’t imagine a self-respecting humanities professor promoting the idea—maybe that just shows how deep the grooves of liberal bias are in my brain. But if triumphalism is seriously part of the program, it seems like a shame to put the West back in it’s rightful position at the apex of history and just stop there. Might as well put mankind back in his rightful place at the apex of creation, too—“intelligent design” is ready and waiting. And with science out the window, why not go whole hog and bring back geocentrism, too? That would be some potent triumphalism—America at the center of God’s universe. With a little of that in the curriculum you might just moderate all those America-hating zealots of oppression studies right out of existence.

Thompson writes as if he knows about higher education and he’s building a case against its liberal elements. Like anyone who’s been to school and can read a paper, he knows something about it. The problem is that his case depends as much on not knowing things as it does on knowing them. It’s a problem for me, I should say—I may be coming at it with the wrong standard. If the blog is meant as nothing more than entertainment with a political slant, then I guess he has a pretty good formula. The post I’m looking at probably wrote itself once he had the quotes, and like-minded readers get a nice little buzz off the righteous indignation. To have that impact there has to be an appearance of reasoning. A lot of actual reasoning with real-life complexities and ambiguities would be counterproductive, though—more effort for less effect. Thompson’s not an academic decision-maker, so I suppose he might as well write whatever he wants. Still, his criticism is supposed to sound smart but it makes a virtue of ignorance, and that really bugs me.

The theme of the post is “classroom political advocacy.” Thompson starts by invoking a scene from the documentary Indoctrinate U. about a professor who faced “a campaign of harassment by left-leaning colleagues.” That sounds like a matter of professional intolerance, not classroom advocacy, but it makes the point that bad things are happening to good people in the halls of learning. Cut to “[a] recent post on classroom advocacy at Crooked Timber, a site popular among left-leaning academics….” Thompson picks out three passages from the comments, arranged from ridiculous to reasonable. The first is from a person who thinks the world as we know it will end if McCain is elected, and since the other side doesn’t play fair why should his side? The comment starts with a disclaimer: “I’m not an academic nor a purist.” But never mind that—the site is still popular with left-leaning academics. And that’s the basic strategy: Pick up statements from here and there, brush off the reservations and qualifications and clarifications, then post them under a banner that says “leftist academic.”

The context for the next pair of quotes—the ones from Johnson’s editorial—is “Grover Furr of Monclair State’s English department,” and “Rhonda Garelick, an associate professor of French and Italian at Connecticut College.” In other words, left-wing professor from a certain kind of department—neither seems to have a public reputation, so the names are irrelevant. In effect it’s about the same as “popular with left-leaning academics,” though less a matter of guilt by association, and it adds a gender and a department. [After posting I see that Furr is somewhat notorious, though not with anything like the name recognition of, say, Ward Churchill.]

The problem isn’t that the quotes are taken out of their textual context, it’s that all context beyond that it’s from the pen of Dr. Lefty is treated as irrelevant. Readers are free to follow the links and soak up all the context they want, and it seems to me that anyone who’s curious or who wants to understand the problems that Thompson is exercised about would want to do just that. Garelick and Furr are both articulate people writing from personal experience (especially Garelick—Furr’s discussion-group post is pretty dry), so whether you’re pro or con there’s more to be gleaned from their writing than how outrageously wrong they are. But to really understand what they’re trying to communicate would require careful reading with the judgmental filters turned off, and I don’t want to be responsible for any harm caused by unprotected exposure to dangerous and offensive ideas. We are, after all, talking about an unreconstructed feminist and a man who disdains conservatives in favor of Marxists. Some plain old realism wouldn’t be so much to ask, though—a vaguely realistic model of college instruction that puts the political issues into perspective, some scepticism towards friendly sources like Indoctrinate U., and a better model of the relationship between what’s thought, said, or written and what’s done.

Garelick turns out to be the richest target, especially after Thompson spices her up to suit his taste. In his view, she “loftily dismissed students who objected to her use of French lessons to express at length her opposition to the war in Iraq.” I’m not sure what makes her dismissal lofty—maybe any opinion printed in the New York Times is by definition lofty. It’s a tone that’s more from his imagination than from the page, in any case. A purer figment of his imagination is the idea she went on “at length.” He returns to it a couple of times in the comments—first referring to French lessons “interrupted with lengthy screeds on the alleged evils of capitalism, ‘imperialism,’ ‘hegemony,’ etc.” and later to the “agitprop monologues” of French professors who “indulge their own political vanities at enormous length.” This is probably just a fact of life—left-wing professors drone on and on when they’ve got the indoctrination bug. She might have done just that, for sure, but all she says is that she “broached the topic of Iraq.”

What business does a professor of French have setting aside her syllabus to critique the war? I’m inclined to doubt that she has any business doing it. It’s a good question, anyway, and I don’t blame anyone for finding her presumption annoying or even offensive. The essay as a whole is grounds to wonder what goes on in her classes, where her priorities are, but it’s not grounds for any conclusions about those things. If, when she says she wants to “teach[] ‘wakeful’ political literacy: the skills needed to interrogate all cultural messages,” she’s sincere about the “all,” willing and able to take up feminist orthodoxy as critically as war-on-terror orthodoxy, that would make a big difference. If she’s at least ready to listen to her students as she is to lecture then, that would also make a big difference. The overall impression I get is of an attentive and responsible teacher. It’s not something I’d bet a lot of money on, but the clues are there and they clearly didn’t make a dent in Thompson’s armor of preconceptions. He found what he wanted to find—a stand-in liberal blowhard.

Thompson’s commenters take him up on the implicit invitation to sound smart sounding off, comfortable that even if they know very little, they know all that really matters. The setup is about the same as on Durham-in-Wonderland, where the posts often give the stamp of approval (Harvard PhD-certified) to irate ignorance, and the comments follow suit (with a vengeance). I saw the same sad dynamic on the Volokh Conspiracy, again engineered by a professor. Thompson chimes in in the middle of his comment thread with an opinion about the cost of liberal bias: because students are being “spared serious and thoughtful contact with opposing arguments, their own views can easily become lazy, reflexive and glib.” He and his crew do a superb job of modeling the problem.

Overall the comment thread has a clubhouse atmosphere—the reactions are not as vehement as on DIW, I guess because the evildoers are more generic and their offenses are not so fresh and outrageous. The tone is also not as vindictive as DIW tends to be, though several commenters relish the thought of suing the pants off that inexcusable professor of French (can you say faux juridicalism?). The prevailing sentiment at its most tasteless and overwrought comes from the clever fellow who’s about to send his kids “down the “large intestine of the university system” where they “may be exposed to this gibberish from incompetents who would be more benefit to society if they were waiting tables.” That’s not to say the comments are uniformly ridiculous and uniformed—they aren’t. What’s most notable, anyway, is what’s missing—there’s no inclination to either look into a mirror or take on more challenging targets than the inflatable monsters in the kiddie pool.

When I finally clicked over to Crooked Timber I was surprised to find a deliberative post questioning the ethics of devoting 45 seconds as students were gathering before class to encourage them to register to vote. That’s some perspective right there, and if you set this post and its comments next to Thompson’s, the idea that our universities need more conservatives to moderate the feckless liberal ideologues doesn’t come out looking so good. On Crooked Timber, Brian poses a real-life moral dilemma, elaborates some arguments on either side, and opens the floor. Mixed in with the usual comment-forum posturing and chatter are positions pro and con that are more reasoning that rhetoric—it’s almost like an honest-to-goodness debate. Thompson and company, on the other hand, prop up some stick figures and then bowl them down. It’s just a random comparison that, in the big picture, proves nothing. But it’s hard to take criticism seriously if the people pushing it (often pretty smugly) can tolerate that much dissonance between their rhetoric and the example they’re setting.

Thompson’s thoughts about students being spared from opposing arguments was a response to one of the few readers’ opinions with straightforward real-life implications:

I have three kids in college. In every case they have encountered a stereotypical liberal professor who indulged in the type of teaching I like to call “regurgitative learning”. They like to hear THEIR ideas, THEIR opinions and THEIR political views written down as mantra by their students. Opposing views are not acceptable and can be cause for failure.

In the same vein, another commenter with a kid in college says that “[she] told [her daughter] to lie, if necessary, to get through classes. Just give them what they want to hear…. [Her friends] all routinely lie on exams or papers, just to please their profs.” The fact that she thinks of lying as an option shows that something is seriously wrong (including her signature, “hermeneutics,” which, incidentally, is why I’ve arbitrarily made the person a “her”). Exams and papers are about knowing things and being able to reason and write—if the student has to take a position on some issue, it should be completely irrelevant whether it’s their actual opinion. Lying or not is beside the point (or at least should be). I don’t doubt that some professors are confused about this, but if it’s typical or even common where “hermeneutics” sent her daughter, then she chose the wrong school. Grades given to writing that backs up an opinion depend on overall impressions that can’t be quantified. That leaves a lot of room for misunderstanding. I suspect, though, that the more clueless and indifferent students—the ones who don’t really understand or care what it means to line up an argument in support of a conclusion—are the ones most likely to imagine that the trick is to just regurgitate. Anyway, what I’m most likely to conclude from a paper that parrots my opinion is that the student can’t think for herself, and that’s the practical problem with that parent’s advice—it might work well with a few bad professors, but the others might decide her daughter is a dimwit. It’s hard for me to believe that anyone who gives a damn about education would give such advice to their child.

I do believe that there are preachy liberal professors out there. Based on the bitter and sarcastic comments I’ve come across, it seems that they leave a lasting and bad impression. As a student I never experienced any overt campaigns of indoctrination in the classroom, and it could be that I’m unfairly downplaying the complaint because of that. But anyone who’s more interested in taking full advantage of the better professors than in fooling the bad ones should read Chris Goff’s no-nonsense effort to “dispense some advice for students who want to remain true to themselves while turning in rigorous academic work.”

• js mill conservatives stupid critique
• john stuart mill quote conservative stupid
• john stuart mill i didn’t mean to say that conservatives are stupid people
• i did not intend to suggest that all conservative people are stupid but i did intend to suggest that all stupid people are conservative.

There’s another cluster that doesn’t seem to be as historically informed:

• stupid conservatives
• why are conservatives stupid?
• conservatives are stupid jokes
• stupid things conservatives say
• every stupid person i know is a conservative

Like Obama said to Letterman, it’s silly season in American politics—it seems like we’re really outdoing ourselves this time. I’m guessing that’s the spirit behind most of those searches (I’m not sure what the spirit behind the search on “lawn guys are stupid” was, though). Nothing spreads election-season cheer like a discussion of the innate stupidity of the other side, especially when the theory is endorsed by a certified Great Thinker.

The long-winded googler was definitely wrong about what Mill intended to suggest, dumbing it down by exaggerating the relationship (and I’d be willing to bet the query didn’t come from a conservative). This quote, apparently from a letter Mill wrote to a Conservative MP, seems to be what the searcher had in mind (emphasis added):

What I stated was, that the Conservative Party was, by the law of its constitution, necessarily the stupidest party. Now, I do not retract that assertion; but I did not mean to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative.

Mill was commenting on a tendency he observed in a political party in mid-19th-century England—capital-C Conservatives, who he considered not inevitably but generally stupid.

One objection I found to the philosophy professor’s wisecrack is that those Conservatives of yore were not conservative in the current sense of the word. And I found other suggestions, reading over that controversy, about what Mill probably didn’t mean to say. A recent New Yorker had an article by Adam Gopnik about Mill, and it has a fine paragraph about what Mill did mean to say (hat tip):

After Harriet’s death, Mill entered Parliament, in 1865, as a liberal backbencher, and did about as well as intellectuals usually do there. He was often hooted, and became notorious for having once described the Conservatives as “necessarily the stupidest party.” What he meant wasn’t that Conservatives were stupid; Disraeli, who was running the Tory Party then, was probably the cleverest man ever to run a political party, and Mill’s own influences from the right were immense and varied. He meant that, since true conservatism is a complicated position, demanding a good deal of restraint when action is what seems to be wanted, and a long view of history when an immediate call to arms is about, it tends to break down into tribal nationalism, which is stupidity incarnate. For Mill, intelligence is defined by sufficient detachment from one’s own case to consider it as one of many; a child becomes humanly intelligent the moment it realizes that there are other minds just like its own, working in the same way on the material available to them. The tribal nationalist is stupid because he fails to recognize that, given a slight change of location and accident of birth, he would have embraced the position of his adversary. Put him in another’s shoes and he would turn them into Army boots as well.

Applying that to the present is no trouble at all, which might mean that it’s not really Mill but Mill remixed according to Gopnik’s modern sensibility. Either way, our supposedly conservative president has just pushed through a massive public bailout of the banking system. Calling it “capitalism on the way up and socialism on the way down,” Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Tx) sounds like the one demanding from his party some “restraint when action is what seems to be wanted.” And, turning from economic catastrophe to political farce, the nomination of a stunningly insular 44-year-old to be vice president—that looks like the problem of having “a long view of history [or anything else] when an immediate call to arms [or the pressing need to get elected] is about.”

And then there’s “tribal nationalism.” It’s not something that comes up in any of the passages I’ve read about Conservatives from Mill’s writings. But in Subjection of Women, he has this to say about stupidity and tribalism:

Stupidity is much the same the world over. A stupid person’s notions and feelings may confidently be inferred from those which prevail in the circle by which the person is surrounded. Not so those whose opinions and feelings are emanations from their own nature and faculties.

Whether it’s true to Mill or not, Gopnik’s line about the absurd significance given to an accident of birth captures my feelings about flag-waving, love-it-or-leave-it patriotism and a few other conservative staples. These days “stupid” is a vague and childish word, though—it’s a playground insult. If it’s replaced with “ignorant,” the ideas rings truer. And “tribal nationalism,” for the present, is as sensitive to internal red state/blue state borders as it is to international ones. With those caveats, I think the charge that “Barak Hussein Obama” is a closet muslim and that he pals around with terrorists—appeals to ignorance and fear as well as stupidity—are fine examples of the modern-day degeneration of conservatism into tribalism. It seems that it’s gotten so hot that it’s even burning McCain, and while he didn’t set all the fires, his campaign hasn’t shied away from fanning the flames—that’s what Palin is there for.

I have to admit that I get some satisfaction watching McCain struggle to tamp down the ugliness that he had apparently hoped to mobilize and then channel. But my side is quite capable of getting into the same kind of trouble—every so often the sans-culottes get riled up and want to chop off some Establishment heads. In the Duke lacrosse case—a pretty good microcosm of American culture-war politics—the strident, intolerant tone was set by zealots from the left, who went for a different part of Establishment anatomy (and if that doesn’t count as a stroke of sheer stupidity, I don’t know what would). Timothy Burke’s latest post, about how demoralizing he finds the “infinitely escalating spiral of spew from hardcore opponents of Obama,” drew a comment from a San Franciscan who keeps quiet about his support of McCain for fear of vandalism and ostracism. I wish I could think of a good reason to doubt him, but I can’t. The real problem, I’m afraid, isn’t conservatives, it’s people.

North Carolina’s Commemorative Quarter to Honor Duke Lacrosse False Rape Case

DURHAM - North Carolina officials proudly unveiled the state’s new commemorative quarter, which will pay homage to the Duke Lacrosse false rape case that wrongly charged three innocent college men with raping a stripper.

Duke University President Richard Brodhead, who heads the state’s commemorative quarter committee, told reporters that “although the facts said that the three accused young men were innocent, the larger truth said they should have been imprisoned. After all, they are privileged white males. But one can’t have everything, can one?”

The next couple of paragraphs have the fictional Brodhead rejecting other designs because—here’s a surprise—they’re not politically correct. Mayberry’s out because of Andy Griffith’s “‘appalling record in fighting for women’s rights’ on the show.” And no Wright Brothers—they’re “not sufficiently diverse to warrant this honor.”

Snore.

It works for some guy at the Misandry Review: “Wow! Incredibly biting satire, skewering gender political correctness and feminist sensibilities.” Biting, sure, but funny? Maybe so—there’s no accounting for taste.

My theory at the moment, though, is that satire has to be in the realm of plausible to be funny—believable except for the twist, or something like that. This one is not in the realm. It’s clueless playing around with an imaginary world of boundless and dogmatic “political correctness.” It’s not that there’s no such thing—the ideal of equality has produced its share of perspective-free zealots—but flashing the PC card has become a reflexive defense for the insecure and narrow-minded, and a perspective that’s gone whiney doesn’t make for good satire.

Hoping for something better, I searched the archives of The Onion. They ran two Duke lacrosse stories. The more recent one (“Report: Almost Nobody Raped During Duke’s First Lacrosse Match”) isn’t one of their best efforts. The other one (“Duke University Equestrian Team Hoping To Avoid Investigation Into Their Sex Scandal”) is from April 6, 2006, only a few weeks into the scandal. I particularly like the last paragraph.

“These guys were brought up to believe that they can have any horse or woman they want, and that’s unconscionable—but a formal investigation would tear this campus apart,” history professor Woodrow Peterson said. “After all, the Duke University community barely tolerated the systematic sexual abuse of two black women at the hands of its students. If word got out that valuable horses had been treated that way, this place would explode.”

Now that’s a punch line. It’s sly, but it nails the overwrought and distorted liberal moralism that flowed so freely during the first few weeks of the scandal.

As an antidote to all that nonsense—and whatever nonsense I’m adding to it—let me point you to the latest from Michael Gustafson. He’s an intermittent blogger in the first place, and he’s not writing about the lacrosse case much anymore, so it’s worth making a note of it when he does. While I’m at it, I’ll highlight a long comment he left on my blog a couple months ago. For those of us inclined to make strong statements about the scandal, there’s an enigmatic sentence near the end that deserves careful consideration.

Part of why I’ve stopped blogging (much) on the original case or any of the cases that follow is there’s much more work to be done and certain aspects of public participation, I’ve found, have had a negative effect on the possibility of making real change.