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

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

[Update below]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s the whole exchange between me and Johnson.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To Prof. Zimmerman:

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

“We try to hire the best, smartest people available,” Brandon said of his philosophy hires. “If, as John Stuart Mill said, stupid people are generally conservative, then there are lots of conservatives we will never hire.


“Mill’s analysis may go some way towards explaining the power of the Republican party in our society and the relative scarcity of Republicans in academia. Players in the NBA tend to be taller than average. There is a good reason for this. Members of academia tend to be a bit smarter than average. There is a good reason for this too.”

From the comments posted after the article you can get a pretty good sense of how that went over, or google “Robert Brandon” Duke stupid for a broader sample. Reflecting on the remark after “two days of venomous, hate filled e-mails from self-described ‘conservatives,’” Brandon said, “In my response to The Chronicle reporter I gave a quote from John Stuart Mill that I thought was quite funny. I now see that the humor is not much appreciated in this context.” In writing, at least, the remark strikes me as arrogant and not very funny, and I’m not sure that even sympathetic readers picked up much humor. But as a smoking gun in the crime of liberal bias the remark was very much appreciated—the Google search above calls up a little feeding frenzy of critics who were, on the whole, remarkably uncritical and opportunistic in their approach to such a useful quote. Recently it’s cropped up again as part of a minor farce.

[Here’s more about Mill’s theory of conservatives.]

It seems pretty obvious (to me, at least) that Brandon’s comment is just a pretentious version of the kind of reflexive, snarky put-down that each side of the political spectrum is constant throwing at the other. It takes a pretty shallow or self-serving perspective to assume that it’s deeply revealing of how he approaches decisions or interactions involving conservative students or faculty. That’s the sort of spin you’d expect from a partisan rag, and sure enough Rachel Zabarkes Friedman, writing for the National Review, put Brandon’s remark on her list of “five of the most outrageous campus incidents of the last academic year.” Her paragraph about it ends with a little idle speculation: “So why aren’t there more Republicans in academia? Maybe it’s because even the capable ones have been kept out, by the likes of Robert Brandon.” Unless she did a whole lot more investigating than it seems, she’s in no position to make generalizations about “the likes of Robert Brandon.” She has an uppity liberal-professor sock puppet who can mouth the words, though, and that suits the National Review just fine. But here’s one from a professor, Erin O’Connor, and she doesn’t do much better: “It says something about a department—if not the university as a whole—when its leader will come right out and say that the reason there aren’t more conservatives teaching college is that conservatives are stupid.” The claim about his department is especially empty. Other than the emphasis on philosophy of biology it looks like a pretty traditional philosophy department. It’s not clear how you’d find out if the chair’s comment about stupid conservatives really says something about them. It would definitely take some work, so why not just say it?

It’s a tedious and often disingenuous habit to treat attempts at humor, even those that bomb, as revelations of the real beliefs that the joker would otherwise deny or keep under wraps. All the conservative tut-tutting about Brandon’s remarks suggests that feminists aren’t the only ones who can’t take a joke (I’ll hand that off to the fabulous Nellie McKay at the end of the post). Joke or not, a quote relayed by a reporter is not the same as a first-person written statement. If Brandon had written the bit about Mill and stupid conservatives in an op-ed, presumably he would have made sure that his meaning came across in print, and it would make sense to treat it as a serious opinion. He may well be arrogantly clubby about the predominance of liberals in the humanities faculty, or he may be inclined to bullshit when he gets a question that he hasn’t thought much about, or he may have been blowing off steam after reading the ravings of some fringe professor pushing “Intelligent Design” as science. There are plenty more possibilities—I don’t know Prof. Brandon so I’m not suggesting any particular interpretation. My point is that the quote got the play that it did because it was useful—it’s actual significance is uncertain but was probably vastly overstated by his critics. It doesn’t say much for the seriousness of the cause of “intellectual diversity” that a glib remark to a campus newspaper has to be overinterpreted and oversold to make the case for it.

When it comes to using quotes for impact, with little regard for either their significance or their context, KC Johnson is hard to beat. About a year and a half after Brandon made his infamous comment, Johnson used it in an editorial for the Chronicle of Higher Education, a critical look at the explanations and justifications given by the “academic Establishment” for its leftwards imbalance. In retrospect it reads like a warmup for the anti-academic crusade he piggybacked on the lacrosse case—the narrowly-framed issues and boilerplate rhetoric were ready and waiting for the “listening” statement to come along. The editorial is a mix-and-match of quotes framed as evidence of bias but otherwise largely unanalyzed—The Cigarette Smoking Blog (!) has a handy list of some of them. I haven’t checked to see whether there’s any of the misrepresentation that he indulged in while writing about the lacrosse case. But even without digging through his sources it’s clear that he makes no meaningful distinction between George Lakoff speaking to the New York Times, Brandon joking to a student reporter, and some random professor blogging about who’s “f-ing smarter.” They’re treated as equally significant and representative—a fair sign, I think, that Johnson’s main interest is in what sounds good and makes points for his side.

Brandon’s quip about conservatives being stupid is circulating again because of a little farce that Inside Higher Ed recounts in a recent article—“In Culture Wars or Duke-Bashing, Do Facts Matter?” They didn’t to Edward Bernard Glick, an emeritus professor of political science at Temple University, when he wrote an editorial that ran in the Jerusalem Post and, with a somewhat different ending, on the website American Thinker. It’s an especially cranky and slapdash version of the formulaic rant about how everything’s going to hell (aka the academic declensionist narrative). Evil Bender goes into the gory details of Glick’s “logical fallacies, lack of evidence, lack of proper attribution, and… burning desire to pin all of society’s ills on the academy.” What I find interesting is that what drives the reasoning (such as it is) is assumptions about the people responsible for the decline.

He brings the anonymous bad guys on stage as protesters at the ‘68 Democratic national convention in Chicago. “[W]hat did these Marxist demonstrators and their cohorts elsewhere do next? They stayed in college. They sought out the easiest professors and the easiest courses.” Safe from the draft, they whiled away the Vietnam war lowering academic standards, and when the war was over they had nothing better to do than get tenure and transform the university into “the most postmodernist, know-nothing, anti-American, anti-military, anti-capitalist, Marxist institution in our society.”

Thanks to this takeover by ignorants, college graduates these days are “well trained, but badly educated”—they’ve been trained “to feel sad, angry or guilty about their country and its past” in an intolerant atmosphere in which “politically-correct feelings are now more important than knowledge,… logic, and critical thinking.” When it comes to Darfur, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, “Muslim hatred,” gas prices and the energy supply, they have everything completely wrong. The professors responsible for all this miseducating don’t make much money but they get “huge psychological incomes in the form of power.” They “shape the minds of their students” and control hiring, promotion, tenure, etc., so naturally they pack the faculty with like-minded comrades. (Facetiously, I think, John K. Wilson flips the point about income on its head—it’s the liberals who are stupid for going into such a low-paying profession).

Duke University is a case in point. Some time ago, a department chairman* was asked in an interview on NPR if his department hired Republicans. He answered (I paraphrase from memory): “No. We don’t knowingly hire them because they are stupid and we are not.”


If I were a in his field, Duke would never hire me, for I am a Republican, and a Jewish one at that. Moreover, when I was an active academic during and after the Vietnam War, I audaciously taught politically-incorrect courses: civil-military relations and the politics of national defense.


*Correction: The author initially identified the speaker as the chairman of Duke’s psychology department. This was an error of memory. The author and American Thinker apologize to the chairman in question and to readers for this error.

That’s the end of the article, and he really outdoes himself—not only casually misremembering Brandon’s remark but also slipping in a gratuitous suggestion of anti-semitism, a pat on his own back for bravely carrying the torch for some very conventional subjects, and a wonderfully inadequate correction. If that’s any indication of the quality of his work, it wouldn’t be his politics that kept Duke from hiring him.

[July 18: I pulled the above quote about a week ago—between July 11 and 14, I’m guessing. As of a day or two ago, American Thinker had lopped off the ending and expanded the correction. Today it’s reverted to what I quoted. Gotta wonder what’s up with that.]

Glick’s editorial reads like a feeble parody of Alan Kors’ much more articulate meditation “On the sadness of higher education” from a couple of months ago. Kors gives an especially eloquent account of the academic values he first encountered as an undergraduate, while Glick honors what’s been lost only in strident negatives. But both of them pin the decline on a bunch of ideologues who apparently have nothing to say for themselves that’s worth listening to. For Glick, it’s wild-eyed, wooly-headed “Marxists.” For Kors, it’s “careerist” administrators who have “given over the humanities, the soft social sciences and the entire university in loco parentis to the zealots of oppression studies and coercive identity politics.” In both cases it’s an intellectual cop-out—dismissive characterization in place of an argument. Johnson has given himself the space to take a more creative approach—misrepresenting, exaggerating, and “perfecting” the “race/class/gender extremists” on the Duke faculty to suit his self-righteous crusade. It’s as if, after playing the same video game for two years, he’s still perfectly content on level one, where he can effortlessly mow down the gangs of slow-moving evildoers.

I don’t dismiss concerns about intellectual diversity on campus (“ideological diversity” would be a more accurate term, though). The self-appointed conservative advocates of it—the ones I’ve been coming across—seem to be much more intent on discrediting and denouncing the left/liberal Establishment than on making a case that they represent valuable diversity. They suggest the opposite, in fact, with their willingness to cut corners intellectually. But I know of two professors who, by example, make good cases for the conservative contribution to intellectual diversity. The first is Michael Gustafson, an engineering professor at Duke who, during the lacrosse scandal, managed to be a voice of moderation while also speaking up for the lacrosse players and questioning the judgment of some of his colleagues. He seems to have been among the first to notice Glick’s sloppiness, and there’s a series of posts on his blog that traces his investigation. When he calls it “another unfortunate case of distortion being touted as fact in order to oversell a point…,” I’m guessing he’s looking back to the self-serving distortions that have been a staple of lacrosse-case debate (it’s all too easy to find the same thing elsewhere, of course).

Farther from home, there’s Matthew Woessner, an assistant professor of public policy at Penn State and the subject, along with his wife and professional collaborator, April Kelly-Woessner, of an engaging profile published in The Chronicle of Higher Education early this year. With respect to the debates about intellectual diversity, what sets both conservative husband and liberal wife apart is their committed empiricism—they don’t just debate their disagreements, they go out and do a study. One of their studies documented an effect, generally negative, of professors’ overt politics on students’ engagement and appreciation. Another found that differences in interests and personal values seemed to go a long ways towards explaining why liberals are more likely to pursue PhD studies than conservatives. That doesn’t settle the issue, but it’s a refreshing change from dogma and tribalistic rhetoric.

Woessner also defies the conventional wisdom from the Right that surfaces, for instance, in most any comment thread where academic political bias is in play. For instance: “I was a university faculty member for 14 years and I can absolutely confirm what happens to faculty when they have a difference of opinion with the prevailing groupthink.” I don’t doubt that some people are effectively drummed out of academia for not toeing the liberal line. It’s sure not Woessner’s experience, though—he says “he never confronted intolerance in the classroom. Even some of his most liberal professors went out of their way to solicit his views.” That may not be typical or even common—I really don’t know. I do know that some of us are thrilled to have students who are willing and able to articulate a perspective that contrasts or conflicts with our own.

Gustafson and Woessner show in practice how valuable conservative voices can be to a left-leaning university faculty. But what they bring to the table is more than a party affiliation. There’s a willingness to engage with and respect the other side, and a real commitment to honest, constructive debate. To some extent it probably comes down to personality, and I don’t want to suggest that the only good conservative academics are the ones who make nice. Looking at the opposite extreme, though, Glick’s article is neither constructive nor very honest. If that’s what conservatives have to offer—more right-wing noise trying to drown out the prevailing left-wing noise—it’s not much use as diversity (I should note that it’s not an issue Glick takes up). It seems to me that many of the advocates of intellectual diversity are much closer to Glick than Gustafson, too ready to engage in all-out rhetorical warfare, letting the ends justify the means. A little more leading by example might be nice.

Speaking of people who can’t take a joke, Nellie McKay has something to say…

But as I sort of predicted, Johnson shows the same commitment as William Anderson to a crude “metanarrative” that turns critics like Perkinson into an open book. For instance, “It’s telling that even a Group of 88 apologist like Perkinson doesn’t deny that the Group’s statements and actions, as well as those of local ‘activists,’ bolstered Nifong.” No, actually it’s not telling. On the other hand, it is telling that Johnson continues to rattle along in the mental ruts he’s been digging for more than two years, propping his criticism up with flypaper labels like “Group of 88 apologist.”

My cameo appearance is also telling in a funny way. “As a defender of the academic status quo, Perkinson seems unusually sensitive to criticism of his ideological comrades, and therefore inclined to inflate its presence—much like the Zimmerman blog, which falsely claimed that 50 percent of DIW’s posts were about the Duke professoriate.” I can’t speak for Perkinson, but it’s probably a fair point to make against me. What I wrote, though, was that “Roughly half of [DIW] is devoted to the way the case played out at Duke.” It’s typical of Johnson that he gives my casual estimate such false precision—literalists like it best when things are precisely wrong.

UPDATE: Speaking of ruts, Johnson has put a little note at the end of his post, a remarkably rich misreading of the two sentences just above:

I have been forwarded a post from Prof. Zimmerman in which he denies that his 50 percent total referred to the Duke professoriate, but merely was a reference to how the case affected Duke. It’s not clear to me how he determined his (incorrect) figure, but my apologies for assuming that this Group apologist referenced the faculty with his (incorrect) claim. Interpreted literally, around 98 percent of the posts on DIW refer to how the case affected Duke, since, of course, the case involved three people who at the time were students at Duke. (The remaining 2 percent are posts that deal with bookkeeping matters at the blog.)

I don’t know how anyone could so completely miss my straightforward point about false precision, but there it is. And then for some reason—a lack of alternative models, maybe, or simple opportunism—he treats my comments as a denial demanding correction and apology (they aren’t). The sarcastic apology is little more than a pretense to once again slap the “Group apologist” label on me. I’m not sure why he bothered, since by now his readers must know quite well what kind of cog I am in the machinery of Wonderland. Any new readers have to take his word for it or search, though—he has apparently decided that he’ll no longer dignify my blog with a link when he refers to me.

Apparently the powers that be at Liestoppers decided that if they had to restart their forums from scratch they could at least make lemonade from lemons by keeping certain “predictable annoyers” out of the ranks—on the TalkLeft forum there’s a sad exchange about the new clubbiness. Everyone’s agreeable on the thread that’s sending folks here, but it’s probably not the most representative sample, since it starts with a big smooch for William Anderson’s rebuttal of Robert Perkinson’s review of Until Proven Innocent (UPI) in The Nation online. A little ways down in the thread, lec suggests that Anderson might want to take a swing at me next, since I recently quoted Perkinson with approval. Here’s Anderson’s answer:

I’ll take a pass on this one. The problem is that there is only one “permissible narrative” when something like this comes up: everything has to be framed in the terms of white racism towards blacks (and everyone else who falls into the “color” category).

There can be no other framework of discussion. None. To try to work outside the permissible framework is seen as an act of racism itself.

This framework has benefited a lot of people individually (it has made Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton very wealthy men) and it provides a large number of college faculty jobs and jobs for people in government. As to whether or not it actually benefits the country, or even blacks (and whites) in general is quite another matter. I leave the answer to you.

Say what!? I’m not quite sure how to interpret this—it’s not clear what he’s referring to as “something like this.” My position is that it’s wrongheaded to force the case into any single narrative, and I don’t see how any halfway intelligent person could come away from my blog with the message that I think “everything has to be framed in the terms of white racism towards blacks.” Who’s policing the poor guy’s narratives and frameworks, anyway? And I don’t see any sign that he’s trying to reach outside of his fortified bubble, so what’s the discussion that can have no other framework, and with whom? I know just what it’s like to be told there’s just one “permissible framework” around the case, though—it’s a message I’m constantly getting from people who sound a lot like Anderson. No doubt plenty of the same single-minded, how-dare-you attitude has flowed in the other direction, but in what way has that stopped Anderson from expressing himself? At the moment he seems to have settled comfortably into a sycophantic discussion that’s completely on his own terms.

My experience lately has been of conservatives conjuring up bogeymen (and women) from the Left as a catch-all excuse for intellectual laziness—KC Johnson, Erin O’Connor, Alan Kors, and various commenters here and elsewhere. Anderson is yet another professor debating badly, and he’s about as unsubtle as you can get when it comes to marching out interchangeable ideological automatons from the “hard left.”

The title of Anderson’s article (“Two Angry Men or One Angry Leftist?”) is a play on Perkinson’s, which refers to the book’s coauthors, KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor (“Two Angry Men”). The angry leftist must be Perkinson, though the tone of his review is not at all irate. Roughly the first third of Anderson’s piece is about a different article by a different leftist, Mike Stark, and he really does sound angry. According to Stark, the disbarment of Mike Nifong “reeks of hypocrisy,” since up to that time the state bar had reacted with utter indifference to five death-penalty convictions that were “overturned because of flimsy evidence, unreliable witnesses and the outright illegal actions of prosecutors.” Nifong wasn’t, in Stark’s opinion, singled out because he did worse things than those other prosecutors, he was singled out because he took on people who could afford to fight back, in both the courts of law and of public opinion.

All of that sounds plausible to me, and it seems like Stark has reason to be infuriated. The funny thing is that so far it sounds like a routine post on the Liestoppers’ forum—it could easily be yet another of the symptom-of-a-sick-justice-system stories that are a staple over there if the scenario was moved, say, to Colorado, and the disgraced prosecutor was not Nifong but just some guy. And Stark’s cynical view of the motives behind Nifong’s official disgrace is consistent with the well-known line Perkinson quotes to sum up his “three obvious if oft-overlooked aspects of the case:”

First, Nifong’s spectacular downfall was more exceptional than his grandstanding and indifference to the truth. Second, “privileged white boys” are not commonly victimized by the criminal justice system, although “minority and poor defendants” are. And third, money makes all the difference; most wrongly targeted defendants, especially indigent ones, fare far worse than the well-heeled Blue Devils. Reade Seligmann, one of the exonerated players, makes the point succinctly: “If police officers and a district attorney can systematically railroad us with absolutely no evidence whatsoever, I can’t imagine what they would do to people who do not have the resources to defend themselves.”

For Stark, what adds insult to injury is that he doesn’t think Nifong’s case against the players was so bad after all, even if the prosecutor fumbled pursuing it. Anderson has no trouble shredding Stark’s attempt to show there was credible evidence for a prosecution. But that’s the only part of Stark’s article that Anderson seems to have noticed, and with one angry leftist dispatched to his pigeonhole, Anderson turns to the other. He notes that Perkinson is a slight improvement, since

[a]fter all, he was willing to admit that there was no rape, which is better than Mike Stark did in the hard-left CounterPunch last year, when he claimed that DAMN really was the wronged party and that Reade Seligmann, David Evans, and Collin Finnerty most likely had done everything to Crystal Mangum that DAMN said they did.

DAMN, in case you haven’t guessed, is District Attorney Mike Nifong. In the same spirit of open-mindedness, Anderson cites its “uncritical support [for] Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and Castro” when he introduces the Nation in his first paragraph. The rhetorical stew is bubbling along nicely by the time he drops Perkinson in.

Both Stark and Anderson are in the grip of what liestoppers like to call “metanarrative.” It’s a perfectly good word for the over-arching schematic frameworks that are supposed to capture the deep truths about how the world works. In the lacrosse controversy, though, it’s been reduced to little more than a pretentious codeword for the deep-seated need of mindless leftists to milk race, class, and gender bias for all they’re worth and then some. I’m tempted to keep it in scare quotes. Instead, I’ll just note that most of us are using the term loosely.

Among the perspectives I’ve come across on the lacrosse incident, I think it’s the potbangers that offer the best example of what’s conventionally called a metanarrative. What I find most troubling about the use they make of it is the dehumanizing effects both of vilifying the accused and, more insidiously and ironically, of sanctifying the accuser. A general problem when metanarratives are applied to real-world events is that people tend to be turned into puppets or stereotypes. Wahneema Lubiano describes how the actors in an incident or conflict can be “perfected” in order to give the metanarrative its full resonance. If, for instance, in Stark’s metanarrative justice is a luxury reserved for the rich and powerful, his narrative of Nifong’s disgrace is more compelling if the lacrosse players aren’t just relatively lucky victims of an unethical prosecutor but rich kids who’s freedom was bought with daddy’s cash while innocent poor folks were left to rot in jail. Whether or not that’s what’s going on in Stark’s head is pure speculation—all I can say is that I find it plausible, and I think that people with a strong sense of metanarrative tend to do that sort of thing.

That kind of puppeteering is subtle compared to Anderson’s flagrant typecasting. His metanarrative, if it can still be called that, is more like a conspiracy theory involving whoever’s enforcing and prospering from the one “permissible narrative”—the unholy alliance of Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and a bunch of lefty professors, for a start. Anderson write as if he’s familiar with Perkinson. It’s a familiarity that can’t come from the article itself, but seems to reflect what Anderson thinks he knows about the sort of person who wrote it. Perkinson might “admit that there was no rape,” but only with regret, because he wants nothing more than to nail the lacrosse team as symbols of “unfettered ‘white privilege’.” His “shots at the players” are efforts at “demonization,” and “anything short of declaring them the Very Spawn of Satan simply will not do for The Nation and its hard-left readership.” Which is to say, there’s no need to pay much attention to Perkinson’s text if you understand his program, and Anderson reads his program loud and clear. KC Johnson is also adept at looking through a text to the agenda and mindset he’s sure is behind it. It seems like it would be embarrassing for men with PhDs to let a crude metanarrative do their thinking for them—kind of like showing up in eighth grade with training wheels on your bicycle—but it doesn’t seem to cause them any trouble.

Really the thing that’s ailing Anderson and Johnson isn’t an out-of-control metanarrative, it’s tribalism—it’s personal identification with a cause and with a group, and facile typecasting of the Other, not an intellectual commitment to a rigid theory. And my guess is that in an emotionally charged scandal like the lacrosse case, what looks like blind faith in a metanarrative is likely to involve a touch of tribalism, or maybe a heaping dollop of it.

Anderson sets the rabble-rousing hyperbole aside to point out that it’s quite misleading for Perkinson to claim that in one year, according to the Coleman report, “25 percent of [Duke’s] disorderly conduct violations” were from lacrosse players—it’s a statistic with a sample size of 4, basically meaningless. That’s Anderson’s single piece of factual criticism that sticks. He doesn’t do so well on another point of fact: Perkinson’s claim that Taylor and Johnson don’t discuss the Darryl Hunt case in their chapter about wrongful convictions. Anderson calls the claim “dishonest,” and seems full of confidence that he knows how these angry leftists go about their business:

Actually, they did highlight the Hunt case, and I did as well. However, to have found out that small but important fact would have required that Perkinson actually have read the book instead of just lambasting it as a right-wing tirade.

I was already wondering about this—in the N&O blog thread berating Tim Tyson a few weeks ago, a commenter mentioned a discussion of the Hunt case in UPI. I don’t own the book, but I happened to be near a bookstore this morning. What I found is that there is no entry in the index for “Hunt, Darryl,” and there’s no section about him in the chapter Perkinson is referring to (the link is to the source notes for UPI, where a search will find “witch hunt” several times but no “Darryl Hunt”). Johnson himself says that he and Taylor “mentioned the Hunt case,” so it must be in the book somewhere, but to say they highlighted it is quite a stretch. (It’s clear that I’ve spent way too much time with this stuff because I can just hear Johnson’s indignant tirade about “extraordinarily strong charges … against a fellow academic” if the shoe was on his foot—it plays in my head in the voice of David Frye imitating Richard Nixon on a record I used to love when I was a kid).

So… dishonest? Didn’t read the book? As everyone knows, when it comes to the lacrosse case, It’s Not About the Truth.

[KC Johnson has now posted a rebuttal to Perkinson’s review.]

Tyson did even worse when he lashed back at criticism from Johnson and others in the comment thread to the interview, fighting fire with fire using one of Johnson’s favorite low budget ad hominem attacks. It’s a device that I’ve noticed in Durham-in-Wonderland (DIW) and elsewhere, so it caught my eye when Michael Bérubé mentioned it in the back-and-forth that followed a post about Phyllis Schlafly on Crooked Timber (a debate I wrote about a while back). “[I]n the midst of a discussion of X [someone] demand[s] that the people criticizing X answer his (or her!) peremptory question as to why people are not also criticizing Y.” I agree with Bérubé that there should be a name for people who do this, or at least a name for the maneuver. Here’s the first of two times Johnson does it in his first blast at Tyson:

Ironically, at almost the same time as the vigil, Mangum was videotaped at the Platinum Pleasures Club, dancing in a most limber fashion. No evidence exists that Tyson has ever protested against the Pleasures Club, or has called for local or state government authorities to shut down exotic dancing establishments, even though the women in such establishments are, presumably, “somebody’s daughter and somebody’s sister and somebody’s mother and somebody’s sweetheart.”

It doesn’t take a very close or sympathetic reading of Tyson’s comments about the lacrosse case to see how vacuous this particular point is (worse than vacuous, actually, with the prim but snide, and ultimately gratuitous, juxtaposition of candlelight vigil and “most limber” pole dancing). Tyson was responding, as someone with a stake in Duke as an institution and a community, to the behavior of a cohesive, high-profile group of Duke students, to choices they made about how people can be used in the interest of having fun. Perhaps he deserves to take some hits for excessive concern with that particular party, or for overextended or self-serving rhetoric, or for agenda-driven hostility to a select group of students, but that doesn’t mean that he’s obligated himself to hit the barricades whenever he finds out that a woman in Durham has been used and demeaned. I suspect that with a little ill-will and selective reading, you can cook up some kind of hypocritical failure to act and hold it against most anyone who’s taken a moral stand.

Here is as good an example as I’m going to find of symmetry between the two sides of the lacrosse-case debate, all the way down to the parallel rhetorical questions that I’ve highlighted. Johnson first, then Tyson.

In spring 2007, another group of Duke students held a party. Underage drinking occurred; there were also allegations of drug use. An attendee at the party claimed that she was raped; police subsequently made an arrest.


Yet a Lexis/Nexis search reveals no comment about the affair by Tyson. Given the highly moralistic worldview he expressed to the N&O, this silence is puzzling. Surely the fact that in the 2007 incident the accuser was white and the accused African-American cannot account for Tyson’s silence?

Darryl Hunt went into prison as a teenager. He came a middle-aged man, robbed of much of his life. The city of Winston-Salem paid him many times less than the accused lacrosse players have received so far, and roughly 28 and a half million dollars less than the players are currently suing Durham for. Did KC Johnson or any of the people indignant about the lacrosse case say one word on behalf of Darryl Hunt?

To some extent, each man is just saying that he cares about the right thing—the thing that really matters—and his opponent doesn’t, in spite of all that other person’s moral posturing. It’s a feel-good message for a friendly audience and, at least in Tyson’s case, obnoxious nonsense to an unfriendly one.

Neither holds up very well under scrutiny, though. The spring 2007 incident is different from the lacrosse party in all sorts of ways. It didn’t involved several dozen student athletes leering at strippers they’d hired (or venting their disappointment when there was nothing worth leering at). The accuser in the later incident is a Duke student and the accused is not, and it’s not an allegation of gang rape. The racial configuration is not even close to the most significant difference, and it’s insulting to insinuate that it’s the driving reason that Tyson and others responded differently. It does seem that the Duke administration handled the spring 2007 incident far better than they handled the lacrosse incident (they could hardly have handled it worse). Comparing the two would be a fine idea if it wasn’t done just for the purpose of grinding axes—this brief article in the N&O is at least a gesture in the right direction.

Tyson answers his own rhetorical question with just the kind of broad brush dismissal that he’s chafing at—“You guessed it. Their concern for racial justice is confined to ‘the vanilla suburbs,’ and always will be.” The fundamental issue for Johnson and many others in his camp is due process and prosecutorial abuse. I believe that many of them would like to see real judicial reforms of a kind that would mostly benefit poor and minority defendants—the people who are routinely mistreated by the system as we know it.

In his review of Johnson’s book Until Proven Innocent (co-written by Stuart Taylor), Robert Perkinson does a fine job of separating Johnson’s constructive agenda from the thin-skinned, reactionary obsession with “reverse racism” and the rest of his culture-war baggage. I think the belated and marginalized good sense he credits the book with is even more marginal in DIW, and DIW has been the more influential and destructive of the two, since it shaped perceptions of the case for more than a year before the book came out. But Perkinson is worth quoting to get some perspective on Johnson’s priorities that, unlike Tyson’s, finds its mark:

[A]mid its ravings about Ebonics, Jesse Jackson, “antiwhite hate groups” and the crucifixion of former Harvard president Larry Summers, the book manages to present an important critique of prosecutorial wrongdoing. The authors’ evidence (if not their rhetoric) serves to illuminate three obvious if oft-overlooked aspects of the case: First, Nifong’s spectacular downfall was more exceptional than his grandstanding and indifference to the truth. Second, “privileged white boys” are not commonly victimized by the criminal justice system, although “minority and poor defendants” are. And third, money makes all the difference; most wrongly targeted defendants, especially indigent ones, fare far worse than the well-heeled Blue Devils. …


Taylor and Johnson belatedly grapple with these inconvenient truths. Prosecutor Nifong disrupted rather than destroyed the lives of his victim-defendants, and in one chapter, sandwiched between jeremiads against Catherine MacKinnon and “desperately politically correct” Duke administrators, the authors catalog several cases that have exacted a stiffer toll.

Google turned up a blog entry by David Friedman that sums up the facile political tribalism of internet debates. I think he’s right that human beings are wired to make that kind of in-group/out-group distinction. But it also seems self-evident that a genuine intellectual would reject tribalistic reasoning as a matter of course. Apparently that’s not the case, unless you make it part of the definition of “intellectual.” Judging from his blog, Durham-in-Wonderland (DIW), you’d be hard-pressed to find a more committed tribalist than KC Johnson—in fact I feel like I’ve finally found the word that captures the relentless polarization of Johnson’s Wonderland. In an article I recently criticized, historian Alan Kors starts by idealizing academia as a place that’s utterly hostile to ideological tribalism but then turns to a political pitch that smacks of tribalism, or so it seems to me. It makes sense, I guess, that Erin O’Connor’s reacted to my criticism by confusing me with a whole tribe of “critics.” But before I get to that, a look at the dark side of team spirit…

One of the starkest incidents of tribalism stirred up by rape allegations against the Duke lacrosse team was literally about turf. A couple of weeks into the saga, a couple of Duke students at the Cook Out (a drive-through restaurant) were surrounded and physically assaulted by young men shouting that it was “Central Territory,” referring to historically black North Carolina Central University, where Crystal Mangum, the team’s accuser, was a student. Mangum’s graduation last month provoked a strident op-ed in the Duke Chronicle by Kristin Butler, and the rhetoric of tribal antagonism has flared up again.

You don’t have to go far to see what a hot button Butler pressed—the 500-plus comments that follow her column make it pretty clear. She told Eric Ferreri of the News & Observer that “she’s surprised by the level of reaction she has received, but regrets only that her writing didn’t spark a more constructive dialogue.” Writing that she’d “never again take an NCCU degree seriously, and neither should any other self-respecting Dukie” because “NCCU’s ‘seal of approval’ no longer guarantees good character” wasn’t an invitation to constructive dialog (and since when have colleges been handing out diplomas that guarantee the good character of their graduates?). As she frames it, the problem is that NCCU has done things that are hostile and insulting to upstanding Dukies such as herself. She makes a number of good points that transcend that frame, but her interest in them, and in NCCU in general, pretty much starts and ends with whatever happens to impinge on Duke.

Butler’s chauvinism is most obvious when she writes about Solomon Burnette, a notorious enemy of Duke who graduated from Central last year.

Burnette, you may recall, robbed two Duke students at gunpoint in 1997. After finishing a 13-month prison sentence, he had the audacity not only to enroll in Arabic classes on our campus in April 2007; Burnette also penned a column I and many others interpreted as inciting physical violence against white Dukies in his student newspaper.

Burnette’s column is a nasty piece of work, for sure. The paper’s editors must have some discretion in choosing editorials, and it’s mind-boggling to me that they rationalized this one. NCCU chancellor James Ammons made it clear that, unlike Burnette, he believed that “the facts do matter in this case and every legal case and violence is not the answer.” My understanding of the first-amendment advocacy of groups like FIRE is that toleration for outrageous, irresponsible, and ignorant self-expression like Burnette’s is the real test of our commitment to freedom of speech. Perhaps his suggestion that violence is, in fact, the answer puts him over the line—it’s something that Butler could have argued, anyway, instead of dwelling on just how scandalized she is.

Rev. Carl Kenney, a Duke divinity school graduate and freelance writer, stepped in as Butler’s opposite number, more or less. But Kenney’s reaction also reflects his ambiguous history as an African American who attended Duke. It seems that the choice didn’t sit well with some black Durhamites who weren’t shy about letting him know just how they felt. After working to moderate that reflexive distaste for Duke, Butler’s column left him “feel[ing] like stuffing [his] head in the sand.”

Kenney’s sense of betrayal has a counterpart in the racially-charged animosity that bubbled over into violence early in the scandal. The Cook Out incident and other threats directed at Duke students led to a heightened security consciousness around campus, and according to Charles Piot, Duke’s black male students came under suspicion and scrutiny. Tribal logic is especially hard on the folks with divided or ambiguous loyalties, who don’t obviously fit in one place or the other.

But it seems to me that Kenney gives in to tribal logic, too. He makes little if any effort to separate what I think are natural and appropriate questions about Mangum’s status at NCCU from Butler’s way of raising them. Knowingly making a false felony accusation is a felony for a good reason—it’s terribly destructive. It’s easy to get fixated on the drama of poor black woman vs. rich white men (adding adjectives to taste) but the damage spreads to women who have been raped and those who will be in the future, and it spreads to communities and institutions—the scandal ground its way through Durham as tabloid news and, as NCCU alum W. Russell Robinson says in his response to Butler, “everyone lost” (with that point and several others Robinson seems, to my ear, to be saying that it’s time to set the tribalism aside). Mangum wasn’t held legally responsible for the damage, and as Butler points out it seems that she wasn’t accountable to NCCU’s honor code, either. Instead she’s been awarded a degree in “police psychology.” It’s not clear what sort of major that is—I can’t find any mention of it on NCCU’s web site, which is odd. It’s drawn plenty of bitter sarcasm (“Police psychology? If it includes conning cops, she’s at the top of her class.”). Peel away the sarcasm, though, and there are reasonable questions that a degree in, say, Visual Communications wouldn’t raise.

Kenney believes that Mangum is just “a person getting a second chance after a mistake is made.” As far as I’m concerned she deserves a second chance as much as anyone else. But a second chance implies a fresh start, and with the dust still settling on the scandal and no sign that she’s faced up to her responsibility for it, it’s hard for me to believe that she’s reached that point. It’s not something I can settle one way or the other. What is clear to me is that it’s a situation that should be open to discussion, that calls for some reflection—more than a shrug (“she earned the credits, so here’s the diploma”) or tribal defensiveness (“she’s one of us so leave her alone”). I don’t know exactly how they should go about it—Ferreri mentions privacy laws that restrict the information NCCU can make public about Mangum or any other student, so they can’t and shouldn’t just open her files to the public—but surely there are ways for the school and its community to show that they’re grappling with the issues raised by her conduct. Maybe that would even dampen a little of the free-floating indignation.

I see that while I’ve been puttering away, KC Johnson has put up a post of his own about three reactions to Butler’s column—Kenney’s and two that I haven’t read. One must be in print but not on the web, since there’s no link, and according to the little note Johnson appended to his post, the other one was taken down soon after his went up. Someone posted it in the comments, though, so it’s not gone. Thank goodness.

Johnson’s latest is a by-the-books DIW post of a particular type, running down a list of critics. Tribalism is the main order of business—letting you know who’s wrong and cataloging their failings so you know just how wrong they are. Four numbered items this time—bang, bang, bang, bang. For people keeping score, it seems like a convenient format, though the score must be so lopsided by now that it’s hard to imagine anyone would still care. It seems to be less important to dwell on who’s right—it’s not like there’s any doubt. In this case Johnson just reminds his readers that Butler is an award-winning student journalist and leaves it at that.

He shows once again that he’s never more insistent about the value of facts than when he’s found one he can use to discredit an opponent. Only a certain kind of person would use a “damn-the-facts” argument. And only a true Wonderlander like Rev. Kenney would “fantastically assert” (or claim, demand, wonder, etc.) anything. Johnson and I seem to more or less agree on one thing, at least—some soul-searching on the part of NCCU would be a good thing.

Last week, Erin O’Connor responded to criticism of Alan Kors’ article, “On the Sadness of Higher Education” (originally in the New Criterion, but the full text is available from the Wall Street Journal). She’s

shocked by the amount of vitriol that was slung in Kors’ direction, not least because the academic establishment, if it does nothing else, readily grants authority to analyses based on personal experience and is so friendly to reflective memoirs that it even tolerates a few that have been exposed as fabrications. But Kors is no Rigoberta Menchu, and critics accord him no such authority.

Where did all this “contemptuous dismissal” come from? She gives two links. One is to a post of mine. The other is to the comments on a post in Timothy Burke’s blog, where there are lots of unflattering generalizations about conservatives but I’m the only person with anything to say about Kors’ article—possibly the only one who read it. O’Connor also points to comments on her original post about the article, where Mike cogently suggests that Kors “go[es] off the deep end” on one specific point, and Luther Blisset briefly outlines a more sympathetic perspective on the developments that Kors decries. The most far-reaching criticism is again from yours truly. I did quick Google and Google blog searches and found a number of people who clearly admired the article and only one mild objection—incidentally, part of a thoughtful post that takes on more urgent issues in higher education than the one I’m going on about.

So it seems I’ve become “the academic establishment,” or at least the bulk of it. As Wayne would say, I am not worthy! For one thing, I’ve never accorded a shred of authority to Rigoberta Menchu, haven’t given her any thought at all beyond reading the name here and there. And I’ve never ranked higher than Visiting Instructor—I hope the new title comes with a raise.

It’s disconcerting enough that O’Connor seems to be responding mostly to me but refers instead to “critics” without mentioning my name. What’s even stranger is how little she has to say about what I actually wrote. It’s true that I was sarcastic at times, and no doubt it annoyed her that I wondered out loud if a followup comment I left on her blog didn’t appear because she wanted to “duck the challenge.” But “contemptuous dismissal”? “Vitriol”? I don’t see it. I thought I made it clear that I admire the resonant case Kors makes that a wide-ranging, open-minded dialog of perspectives is the essence of academic intellectualism, even though I don’t understand why he sets the ideal aside when he turns to his political agenda. I quote examples of perspectives on the “therapeutic university” that, in counterpoint with his, suggest a more rounded understanding of the situation. I hoped that part might drum up some more constructive responses, but none of it seems to have registered with O’Connor, nor did the substantive points made by Mike or Luther or any other elusive “critics” floating around in cyberspace.

It’s clear that O’Connor has a great deal of respect and admiration for Kors, and that she’s moved by the “hopeless and defeated” tone of his essay. No problem there—that sort of personal reaction is good blogging material, and people should speak up for their friends. And I suppose looked at that way, it’s fine to point out that he’s “winding down a long, genuinely important career” during which he’s been “one of the most important and influential crusaders for free inquiry that we have.” But to O’Connor these points are not just personal appreciation, they’re somehow an answer to the “critics.” Kors’ fine qualities go hand in hand with the qualities of others who contribute to the “good fight—the fight that organizations such as FIRE, ACTA, the NAS, and individuals such as Mark Bauerlein and KC Johnson fight.” FIRE gets a rhapsodic paragraph, in which she remarks that in the time since it was founded by Kors and Harvey Silverglate, it has “definitively shaped the fair-minded defense of individual rights and free expression on campus… [and] given hope to those who want to believe that higher ed can be saved from itself, and who think it’s possible for the academic world to be usefully and substantively reformed for the good of all.” She’s standing with her tribe, in the firm belief that virtue is on their side.

And then there’s my tribe—the “academic establishment,” “critics” who adore Menchu but dismiss Kors, who deal in “vitriol” and “contemptuous dismissal.” “[H]ard core, uninformed cranks [who] continue to insist that FIRE is a right-wing organization devoted to advancing a right-wing agenda.” No doubt there are critics and cranks like that, but as far as I can see they aren’t involved in this little discussion. Based on my limited experience, supporters of FIRE seem to think that any and all criticism is outright dismissal or condemnation. All I’ve done is to question the highly partisan treatment of the lacrosse case on FIRE’s web site and poke a little fun at the rhetorical excesses of its cofounders. I have to wonder what sort of disclaimer it would take to keep from being lumped with the “hard core, uninformed cranks.”

I’m used to the tribalistic lumping, though no one has found a stranger or more furtive way to do it than O’Connor. It’s usually much more overt. The post KC Johnson wrote to introduce me to his readers started with a ten-paragraph narration of the “long, and torturous, path” of the “Group of 88 rehab tour”—a list of about a year’s worth of seemingly inexcusable and muddleheaded efforts to “rehabilitate the Group from its rush to judgment.” Finally, “[t]he latest stop in the Rehab Tour, a series of posts by Duke Music professor Robert Zimmerman.” I had no personal involvement with anything he lists and no contact with the other professors. But his readers are primed and ready for yet another of those kind of people. It’s easy enough for them to line up much of what I say with their reflexive beliefs about the tribe and whatever doesn’t line up can be ignored. Not that I’m complaining—it’s good for laughs and usually validates my analysis. And there are always a few people who are more curious and open-minded.

Johnson cultivates the tribalistic atmosphere but leaves its coarser aspects to his readers, many of whom happily answer to a title—“blog hooligan”—that sums up the violence and intolerance of tribalism remarkably well. And when it comes to conspiracy theories, the us-against-them mindset is just the ticket. Of the things that have been said about me, this is a personal favorite, from a couple of weeks ago:

If I were an attorney representing any of the plaintiffs in the lax civil suits, Zimmerman would be on my deposition list. He has been poking into what the Klan of 88 did and corresponding with at least some of them (or their enablers).

I can’t really explain how off the wall that is, so you’ll just have to take my word for it. What’s funny is that she (I’m guessing) starts with a reasonably astute analysis of my “modus operandi” in leaving comments here and there. Maybe it’s someone from the bowels of the poststructuralist humanities—someone who’s sophisticated at parsing texts—gone undercover to plant blatant evidence of the “faux juridicalism” that Robyn Wiegman, Wahneema Lubiano, and Michael Hardt wrote about.

It’s not just blog hooligans who are inclined to imagine the “Group of 88” and it’s “enablers” and “sympathizers” as a nefarious tribe. Apparently it’s possible to deplore the hooligans and still insist that Duke’s atrocious reaction to the lacrosse incident has an undeniable tribal “vibe”, or discount my analysis of people and things from Duke on the assumption that I’m acting out of tribal loyalty, or something very close to it. It’s only good sense to be skeptical about my loyalties and my objectivity, but skepticism can also turn into just another excuse to be dismissive.

The News and Observer ran a profile of Tyson about a week ago, highlighting his efforts to “build community across the lines of race and ethnicity.” Readers wrote in to suggest that the paper should have brought up his role in the lacrosse case, so J. Peder Zane emailed Tyson some questions and put the answers on his blog. Tyson alludes to inaccuracies in the early press coverage and suggests that if he’d had a better picture he might have spoken a little differently. But on reflection, he says he “would not go back and change what [he] said very much.” And to some extent I can see why—some of the things he said were, in my opinion, very much on target. Others not so much.

In a short editorial that ran in the N & O on April 2, 2006, Tyson pinpoints the willingness to treat people as things as the real problem with the lacrosse team’s ill-fated party, and as the central issue raised by the case. Probably I’d be able to agree with him wholeheartedly if cooler heads had prevailed at the outset and Nifong hadn’t turned the investigation and prosecution into a fiasco. As it happened, insult was piled on injury. But as a way for people with cash to deal with people who need it, the transaction that night was grotesque, starting with the call to an “escort” (i.e., prostitution) service in which the caller lied about how large the party would be. It would, in my opinion, have been a much different thing if an effort had been made to find performers with the talent and experience to really put on an erotic show—women they cared to know something about and could treat as professional entertainers. They would have saved themselves and the rest of us a whole lot of trouble. Duke, according to its mission statement, is committed to its students’ “development as adults committed to high ethical standards and full participation as leaders in their communities.” I don’t see any way to reconcile that with furtive dips into the sex industry’s trade of dollars for desperation. (I lifted the last few sentences from a comment I made some months ago on another site, and I’m not claiming they represent Tyson’s opinion).

Even though it seems that I see the party in much the same way as Tyson, I’m mystified by his comment, in the same editorial, that “[t]he spirit of the lynch mob lived in that house on Buchanan Boulevard, regardless of the truth of the most serious charges.” To me, at least, the aura of servitude doesn’t resonate with lynching, which is punitive and vindictive, not to mention criminal. The abuse at the party was directed most clearly down the lines of gender and class inequality, which again doesn’t sound like lynching—race certainly added some spark to a volatile mix, but as I see it the setup wouldn’t have been less objectionable if the dancers had been white. By describing the behavior of the partyers in terms of an exceptional and violent act, Tyson made it harder to believe that his objection was unrelated to the assault charges.

The metaphor of a lynch mob has gotten a workout from both sides of the controversy—it seems to be irresistible as rhetoric, but it hasn’t been particularly apt when I’ve come across it.
What comes closest to justifying the comparison is the spirit of vigilantism that’s compromised both sides in the debate. The pretext for the worst that was directed at the team was the impression spread by the authorities that the players weren’t cooperating. Tyson was one of many who accepted the story—in a radio interview early in the investigation, quoted by Johnson, he said, “One of the really terrible things about this is that these young men are banding together and refusing to cooperate with the police investigation.”

Some people took the next step, which was to put pressure on the team not just to cooperate but to confess. The potbangers did it most emphatically and explicitly, but they weren’t the only ones to go proactive. Tyson doesn’t seem to have been involved with the worst of it—I don’t believe that attending a candlelight vigil is nearly as intimidating and offensive as holding a banner that says “castrate” or hectoring the players with emails or classroom lectures—but it seems clear that he didn’t stand in the way, either. And as I said when I wrote about the potbanging protest, it seems likely that Tyson and others who accepted that players were stonewalling would have been much more skeptical about the authorities’ good intentions if the suspects hadn’t seemed so privileged. It doesn’t seem like it should have been so hard at the time, even stirred up by the shocking and outrageous news, to see how naive and wrong it was to think that the players should respond to the authorities with unguarded openness (I can’t claim that if I had been more involved I would necessarily have done better).

Johnson and I seem to be in general agreement that Tyson doesn’t come through with the reconsideration called for by the lynch mob comment and by his support for the story of the team’s non-cooperation. And I think it’s safe to say that both of us think he should be able to find significance in the case beyond his favored cause:

A Duke faculty member, asked to reflect on the “lasting lessons of the Duke lacrosse incident,” doesn’t even mention the dangers of prosecutorial misconduct. He doesn’t even mention the dangers of popular, media, or faculty rush to judgment. He doesn’t even mention the poisonous nature of racialized political appeals, such as that offered by Mike Nifong in the November 2006 election.

There’s room for the case to highlight more than one pressing issue. The ones Johnson lists are all worth attention. Tyson’s is too, especially for Duke, because Duke’s undergraduates do in fact show up with a lot of money to spend, which means they have a significant impact on the surrounding community. And I’d add to the list the willingness of universities to make themselves into what Clair Potter calls a “‘rights free’ zone.” Ultimately the voices dedicated to the one and only thing that really matters—and I don’t see how Tyson could possibly be more dedicated to that than Johnson—reinforce each other and turn the debate into a bitter tug-of-war over false choices. Wackiness thrives on the noise, and pretty soon we’re hearing all sorts of nonsense—white students are under siege from the extremists in “oppression studies,” for instance.

Johnson has an impressive dedication to perfecting his offenders, to borrow Wahneema Lubiano’s terminology. Actually, purify might be more accurate—like a good demagogue, Johnson plays up anything that helps to typecast his targets as dangerous ideologues. But the driving impulse isn’t to make them into perfect bad guys, it’s to make them purely wrong. With some offenders he can tolerate a little ambiguity, but with the likes of Lubiano and Karla Holloway his efforts to portray them as dead wrong on every point are positively obsessive. An easy way to do the trick is to be selective and superficial, as he shows in his recent criticism of the Social Text article by Robyn Wiegman, Wahneema Lubiano, and Michael Hardt. But sometimes it’s a more interpretive endeavor, like the way he counters Tyson’s mental image of “a room full of drunken Duke students, all of them white, [emphasis added [by Johnson]] using an African American woman as live pornography.” Johnson points out that the sole black lacrosse player was at the party, and then chides Tyson for not letting this fact “interfere with his racialized metanarrative.” My feeling is that Tyson does indeed overplay the “racialized metanarrative,” but the fact that Devon Sherwood walked through the door sometime that evening doesn’t automatically drain the incident of racial significance. It’s threadbare reasoning that shows what an absurd fetish Johnson makes of literalism (I guess there’s no way to be more purely wrong than to be literally wrong).

Near the end, Johnson rummages through his rhetorical grab bag to add a few more offenses to the pile and gets a little wild. He shows how Tyson hasn’t changed his conclusions even though he’s apparently absorbed the developments in the case that have corrected the exaggerated impressions left by initial media reports. Fair enough, but then comes the officious remark that “[i]n theory, of course, professors are supposed to be open-minded, and reconsider flawed theses as new facts come to light; Tyson appears unwilling to engage in such self-reflection.” High ideals! If only Johnson would take them to heart. The difference I see between the two professors is not that Johnson is more open-minded or more prone to self-reflection than Tyson—I’m hard pressed to think of a less self-reflective writer than Johnson—but that Johnson is better at protecting himself from any facts that might interfere with his story line.

Finally, Johnson suggests that Tyson’s fixation on the “nature of the party” represents the same kind of “hard-line moral outlook” you’d hear from fundamentalists at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty College or at BYU. That’s a little hard to take from a man who’s spent more than two years judging a carefully selected cast of sinners according to an inflexible, narrow, legalistic moral code. I’ve read post after post on DIW castigating members of the Duke faculty, and it seems that in Johnson’s opinion there was no reasonable way to object to the partyers behavior as anything more serious than routine drunken foolishness. Many of the people who tried to articulate the issues raised by the party didn’t do a very good job—I imagine some did a downright bad job. It’s long past time for Tyson and others who contributed to the controversy to subject that record to some useful self-criticism.

One practical lesson I’d like to learn from the scandal is how to handle myself if sometime int he future offensive student misbehavior brings in law enforcement and the media. Johnson is absolutely right that any public statements should be guided by respect for due process and for my obligations as a member of the faculty. I don’t believe that precludes me from speaking out about what I see as violations of academic and community standards that aren’t in the legal realm. Perhaps Johnson believes that it does. Sometimes he seems to believe that there’s no way to disentangle from the legal realm any judgment about misbehavior on the part of the lacrosse team. If so, I’d love to see the argument. I can’t say I find his endless thumping of chapter 6 of the Duke Faculty Handbook to be very informative. His unwavering dedication to condemnation squeezes out most any kind of constructive criticism, and when it comes to hard-line moral outlooks, Johnson takes the cake.

It’s not surprising that DIW plays well to the anti-intellectual crowd, since Johnson is telling them exactly what they want to hear. I don’t understand how anyone who’s pro-intellectual can swallow the academic-culture side of DIW. It’s especially disconcerting that conservative academics—an embattled minority, or so they say, but presumably still pro-intellectual—are so pleased by Johnson’s dogged prosecution of the “loopy left” that they don’t care how many corners he cuts or how much he caters to ignorance to do it. As long as he’s nailing the guilt-presuming purveyors of bias and relativism, there seems to be no expectation that he should rise to a higher intellectual standard himself.

I’ve been browsing the academic blogosphere trying to understand this disconnect. A link from DIW led me to Erin O’Connor’s blog Critical Mass, where it seemed I might find a more reflective version of Johnson’s general perspective on academia. Her tone is less strident and her interests are more flexible. On the other hand, she describes her blog as “a running chronicle of cant on American campuses,” so the focus is not on what’s typical or representative, it’s on what’s outrageously or pathologically extreme (like the Aliza Shvarts scandal at Yale, which was her main topic during the latter half of April). Even if the targets are chosen from across the political spectrum, it’s a focus that’s good at generating horror and scorn but not so good at fostering understanding. And as far as I can tell, O’Connor’s radar is consistently aimed to the left—maybe she thinks that’s where cant always comes from. DIW is chock-full of right-wing cant, though it’s easy to be oblivious to it if you’re energized by the rhetoric or fooled by the smoke screens (this can’t be a right-wing blog, I support Obama!).

O’Connor posted a long excerpt of Kors’ article, adding a little commentary that highlights his role as co-founder, with Harvey Silverglate, of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). It’s an organization that seems to have a lot of credibility, and not just with the conservative set. I’m sympathetic to their stated cause, and as far as I can tell they’re above-board and effective in pursuing it. But I’m not impressed by the one-sided attention to the lacrosse case on their web site or by Silverglate’s pontification on the subject. I left a comment on O’Connor’s post wondering about some of this and suggesting that for Kors and Silverglate, as for Johnson, ideological considerations trump intellectual standards. The responses were pretty routine, though J.A. DeLater gets some brownie points for metaphorically linking career academics to cockroaches because “[they] can tolerate much higher levels of toxic radiation than humans.”

I tried to post a follow-up comment but apparently the dog ate it. For the record, I’ve attached it to the end of this post. I had the same experience with DIW a few weeks ago. I can’t see any good reason for rejecting either comment—it seems most likely that Johnson and then O’Connor decided that it was easiest to duck the challenge (but I would think that, wouldn’t I?). Given his laissez-faire comment policy and the trivializing insinuation he’d put into my mouth, it was especially questionable coming from Johnson. But nobody owes it to me to post my comments, and it’s possible one or the other was lost through an error or a glitch. [O’Connor’s explanation, which I have no trouble accepting, is that it was knocked out by her spam filter]

When I read all of Kors’ article, it seemed like the product of a split personality, and that O’Connor’s quote only represented one side. In the first part of the article, he looks back at his formative years as a scholar, gracefully evoking the atmosphere of committed intellectualism that drew him in.

The academic world that I first encountered was one of both intellectual beauty and profound flaws. I was taught at Princeton, in the early 1960s—in history and literature, above all—before the congeries that we term “the Sixties” began. Most of my professors were probably men of the Left—that’s what the surveys tell me—but that fact was never apparent to me, because, except in rare cases, their politics or even their ideological leanings were not inferable from their teaching or syllabi. Reasoned and informed dissent from professorial devil’s advocacy or interpretation was encouraged and rewarded, including challenges to the very terms of an examination question. In retrospect, professors who must have disagreed fundamentally with works such as David Donald’s Lincoln Reconsidered (with its celebrated explanation of the abolitionists’ contempt for Lincoln in terms of the loss of status of their fathers’ once-privileged social group) assigned them for our open-minded academic consideration. My professor of Tudor-Stuart history, emerging from the bitter Oxbridge debates over explanations of the English Civil War in terms of class conflict, assigned Jack Hexter’s stunning Reappraisals in Social History to us. When I opined to him somewhat apprehensively that Hexter appeared to have exposed the tendentious use of statistics in my professor’s own prior work, he replied, “You’re absolutely correct.” These were not uncommon experiences in Princeton’s classrooms, and I knew, then and there, that I wanted both to do history and to teach.

In grad school at Harvard, while a few dates left in the midst of dinner on discovering my free- market and hawkish politics, and while I did get thrown out of a party for opposing, when asked, Eugene McCarthy’s view of Vietnam (this should have been a warning), the classroom remained open and, by design, intellectually pluralistic. In our graduate colloquium, we read the major historiographical debates, in works theoretical and monographic, and critical acumen was acknowledged in the force of an argument, not in its political provenance…. In the midst of the “cultural revolution” of the early 1970s, I co-founded a College House and lived warmly with students who mostly ranged from liberal Democrats to true believers of the New Left. They loved to discuss everything, and they did so in good faith and (almost) always ad rem. My students, whom I still meet frequently outside of class, still love to discuss everything, and they still do so in good faith and without ad hominem distractions from real conversation and debate. Critics of higher education who blame students for today’s catastrophes are categorically wrong about agency. It is the faculties (both the minority of zealots and the majority of cowards) and the administrations (both the minority of ideologues and the majority of careerists with double standards) who are to blame.

The academic world I so loved revealed itself best in an undergraduate course I’d taken on the history of Europe in the twentieth century. When the professor, a distinguished intellectual of the Left, returned the midterms to the hundred plus or so of us who were in his course, he said that we’d saddened and embarrassed him. “I gave you readings that allowed you to reach such diverse conclusions,” he explained, “but you all told me what you thought I wanted to hear.” He informed us that he would add a major section to the final exam: “I’m going to assign the book I disagree with most about the twentieth century. I’m not going to ask you to criticize it, but, instead, to re-create its arguments with intellectual empathy, demonstrating that you understand the perspectives from which he understands and analyzes the world.” I was moved by that. The work was Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, and it changed the course of my intellectual and moral life. It also showed me immediately how I wanted to teach as an intellectual historian. Each year, I teach thinkers as diverse as Pascal and Spinoza, Hobbes and Butler, Wesley and Diderot. I offer courses on intellectual history, and the goal of my teaching is to make certain that my students understand the perspectives and rich debates that have shaped the dialogue of the West. I don’t want disciples of my worldview. I want students who know how to read deeply, how to analyze, how to locate the essential points of similarity and divergence among thinkers, and, indeed, how to understand, with intellectual empathy, how the world looks from the diverse perspectives that constitute the history of European thought. I know that I am not alone, but I also know, alas, that I am in a distinct minority in my pedagogical goals in the humanities and the so-called social sciences.

Even with his admirable determination not to treat those times as a golden era—he acknowledges and deplores the racism, sexism, snobbery, and intolerance—there’s still some rose-coloring. If I wrote about my time at Reed College in the early 80s it would probably be colored in much the same way. I remember it as high-minded time and place, with some fine, challenging, dedicated teachers. What I see around me and what happens in my own classes never seems to rise to quite the same level.

Johnson has worked hard to portray a contingent of Duke professors as threats not only to students but to the integrity of the university. Those associated with African & African American Studies (AAAS) and Women’s Studies, especially, have been criticized for sacrificing academic standards to their extremist political agendas. I take the concern seriously, if not the rhetoric—it’s intellectual poison for professors to get into the business of indoctrination. Reading DIW did get me thinking about the issue, but I’ve waded through plenty of the alarmist rhetoric Johnson’s thrown at it and come up with virtually nothing of substance that’s either constructive or insightful. In three paragraphs that evoke a free-ranging dialog of ideas—an intellectual climate that’s not simply tolerant but actively seeks out challenging alternatives—Kors conveys more about the fundamental academic values at stake than Johnson has managed to fit into a few hundred thousand agenda-driven words.

When Johnson talks about the ideals of his profession, he seems to be referring to respect for due process and adherence to the faculty handbook—he doesn’t show any particular interest in the values that Kors highlights, so I probably shouldn’t expect his criticism to be guided by them. It’s harder to fathom why Kors lovingly wraps his souvenir only to toss the package out the window in order to grind his culture-war axe. He’s editorializing, not bouncing ideas around in a seminar, so it’s true that in the end scholarly neutrality has to take a back seat. But where is the spirit behind “read[ing] deeply,… locating essential points of similarity and divergence among thinkers,… [and] understand[ing], with intellectual empathy, how the world looks from the diverse perspectives that constitute the history of European thought”? If that’s the attitude that best serves students in the classroom, how is it that the readers of the New Criterion are best served by ditching it?

Turning to the contemporary university, Kors finds what seems to be an entirely new species of professor—careerists who mean no harm but are at the mercy of a reflexive ideology:

To understand why and to understand one of the few vulnerabilities of universities to actual accountability and reform, one must understand the hierarchy that predicts academic institutional behavior: sexuality (in their language, “sexual preference”) trumps neutrality; race properly conceived easily trumps sexuality; sex properly conceived (or, in their language, “gender”) easily trumps race; and careerism categorically trumps everything. From that perspective, the careerists who run our campuses have made a Faustian bargain (though they differ on which is the devil’s portion)….. From diverse motives of ideological sympathies and acute awareness of who can blackball their next career moves, they have given over the humanities, the soft social sciences, and the entire university in loco parentis to the zealots of oppression studies and coercive identity politics. In the latter case, it truly has been a conspiracy, with networking and common plans. In the former case—the professoriate and the curriculum—it is generally, with striking politicized exceptions, a soft tyranny of groupthink, unconscious bias, and self-inflated sense of a mission of demystification. Most of the professors I meet are kind, indeed sweet, and certainly mean no harm. It is profoundly sad to see what they have become.

One thing Kors and Silverglate have in common is ready access to the pathos of the decline and fall of the academy. Kors’ “profoundly sad” conclusion echos a remark Silverglate made about Duke chemistry professor Steven Baldwin—that it was “unbearably sad” that Baldwin ended up apologizing for the scathing criticism of Duke’s administration and some of its faculty in his October 2006 op-ed.

Kors’ facile reduction of a large segment of the university to a simplistic ideology brings the Baldwin incident to mind in other ways. According to Johnson and Silverglate, what happened after Baldwin’s op-ed was published was that left-wing ideologues—the group Kors is lamenting—ganging up on him because he dared to buck their agenda. That may or may not be what happened, as far as I can tell. What’s striking to me is that those who take Baldwin’s side are determined to reduce the incident to that one single thing, no matter what. They’re horrified by Robyn Weigman’s charge that Baldwin used “the language of lynching,” but they can’t seem to imagine any legitimate objections to Baldwin’s suggestion that certain (unnamed) colleagues should be tarred and feathered and then run out of the academy on a rail. That starts looking a lot like a self-serving delusion when you realize that the only trace of this onslaught against Baldwin that’s come to light is two letters—Weigman’s published response and Kerrie Haynie’s personal email—and the latter doesn’t fit the narrative of shrill pc outrage at all.

No professor at Duke was a more outspoken advocate of the university in loco parentis than Baldwin. Personally, I’m almost as bothered by his paternalistic certainty that we should all be treating our students as “our kids” as I am by his enthusiasm for summary justice. The parental overtones of the op-ed don’t seem to have been much on Silverglate’s mind, but it’s still ironic that he seems to find the philosophy laudable—he certainly doesn’t make any object to it—while Kors finds it deplorable.

It would be pretty fruitless to try to refute Kors’ sweeping conclusions, especially since they’re drawn from personal experience. I’ll pull up a few texts associated with the lacrosse case, though, to suggest that he’s chosen to face down a flock of cardboard cutouts instead of taking up the other side’s perspective as a challenge.

In the Social Text article that figured in my last two posts, Robyn Wiegman, Wahneema Lubiano, and Michael Hardt have quite a bit to say about the university in loco parentis. They see the university before the revolutions of the 60’s as an analogue of the patriarchal family. The student revolutions forced an end to that paternalism, but according to the authors the parental model has made a comeback in a somewhat different guise, serving the business interests of the institution, not the political interests of any of its faculty.

As various historians of the U.S. university have noted, the reemergence of parental logics in the aftermath of student revolts has been accomplished primarily by legal, not moral or ethical, debate. Kinship obligations manage the imaginary realm in which the university’s need to protect its students from mental health problems, addictive behaviors, and violence to the self or others arises from its need to protect itself from its students and their increasingly litigious parents. It’s a complicated negotiation: the cultivation of students as “our kids” functions in order to safeguard the university from the violence and abuse that our kids might do to themselves and to others, with the specter of lawsuits constantly looming in the background. …

The good parents of today’s university live in the student service sector. It functions as the relay between demands for the university to address the students’ needs as members of specific groups (whether gender, racial, ethnic, national, or sexual) and the institution’s investment in the renewed cultivation of the parental model. Under the auspices of student services, the new publics that accompanied student revolt can be corralled back into the cultivation of the student as the institution’s child and as its future donor. … To say, then, that student services becomes the means to acknowledge the importance of race and gender in the form of consigning them to the realm of student life is to mark the way that the force of student rebellions has been managed, in much the same way that the primary discourse mobilized by these agencies—of social justice, fairness, and equity—has been reproduced in the service of empowering those who were once its targets.

In this context, it is important to note how the early historical ties between student centers and the intellectual projects of race and gender studies have been disarticulated in this process. On many campuses, in fact, there is growing antagonism between the two entities. In the relation between women’s studies and women’s centers, for instance, it is often the stance toward sex and sex publics that generates a rift, especially when scholars who work in queer studies, human rights, and sex trafficking do not follow the reigning discourses of women’s empowerment that so closely analogize sex and oppression. University administrations have found a certain relief in the constituency languages that student services provides, in part because these languages displace the problem of attending to the knowledge challenges that rigorous attention to the study of gender and racial formation raises.

The only way I could really evaluate this analysis would be to work through some examples, taking into account the practical problems of managing a community of thousands of post-adolescents who are making their first steps into adulthood and independence. Right now all I want to point out is that what Kors portrays as a unit with a common purpose—the professors of “oppression studies” and the parental administrative apparatus—looks from the other side like two distinct things that are more and more at odds, despite their common roots.

The distinction between the corporate interests of the university and the political and intellectual interests of its faculty is an important one. History professor Claire Potter (aka Tenured Radical) sums it up well—she clearly isn’t a fan of the university’s “‘rights free’ zone.”

Johnson may have been correct that Duke did not handle the lacrosse case well… but this was not a symptom of the university’s liberalism as an institution—quite the reverse, in fact. It is the flip side of a university governance process, almost ubiquitously shared among institutions of higher education, that more or less declares the campus a “rights-free” zone. This elimination of civil rights in university processes is neither a liberal nor a conservative issue: it is a question of whether the private sphere—whether that be Walmart or Harvard—can make its own rules to protect its own interests as an institution. The law says they can, and they do.

Potter’s analysis is emphatically borne out by Elliott Wolf’s “Dude, where’s my rights…” series in the Duke Chronicle (there are annotated versions of the articles on his home page). Wolf documents eight years of steady erosion in respect for due process in the Duke Judicial Code. It’s first-rate student journalism that picks up on an issue central to the lacrosse case but without getting mired in lacrosse-case tunnel vision. He sums up his findings in the Coupe de Grace (his term):

Since 1999, the Office of Judicial Affairs has watered down or eliminated
every major due process right afforded students facing adjudication; it has so broadened
its policies and procedures that almost any student could be summarily subjected to
judicial action for any reason; it has eliminated all representative student involvement in
making and enforcing undergraduate policy; and lastly, it has begun colluding with local
law enforcement in ways that arguably undermine students’ basic constitutional rights.

Wolf’s last piece for the Chronicle, a covert look at the Student Affairs-Industrial Complex, meshes nicely with Wiegman, Lubiano, and Hardt’s observations about the “student services sector.” The overall impression I get from Wolf’s coverage is that student affairs (judicial or otherwise) is its own little fiefdom, largely independent of the faculty.

Kors works himself up to a fever pitch with a string of rhetorical questions about the “almost insoluble problem of time” faced by professors intent on indoctrination: “How, in only four years, can they disabuse students of the notion that the capital, risk, productivity, and military sacrifice of others have contributed to human dignity and to the prospects of a decent society?” etc., etc. He follows that a couple of paragraphs later with the statement of purpose that, in his opinion, would constitute “truth in advertising” for the leftist “academic enterprises” that have a grip on higher education:

Let colleges and universities have the courage, if they truly believe what they say privately to themselves and to me, to put it on page one of their catalogues, fundraising letters, and appeals to the State assembly: “This University believes that your sons and daughters are the racist, sexist, homophobic, Eurocentric progeny or victims of an oppressive society from which most of them receive unjust privilege. In return for tuition and massive taxpayer subsidy, we shall assign rights on a compensatory basis and undertake by coercion their moral and political enlightenment.”

I’ve come across this idea before—near the end of one of the earliest comments I got on a lacrosse-case post, for instance:

Why should I increase my law practice dramatically to earn more income to support the salaries of faculty members who think the constitution does not apply to their students? I don’t like that it comes down to money but it is a consideration. I understand the faculty believes I have raised a racist and sexist child who desperately needs their education.

The person who wrote that is too articulate and thoughtful for me to dismiss, and I can see how someone who’s remote from university life could end up with the impression. It’s nutty stuff coming from a professor, though. Kors’ dire portrait goes far beyond reasonable concern about the cumulative effect of subtle, unconscious bias combined with the apparent willingness of a few professors to flirt with the line between education and indoctrination, and perhaps cross it. That may be a real problem, but in the context of the whole array of social and intellectual influences the students are navigating, it doesn’t justify the hyperbole. And if Kors is right about what an honest mission statement would look like, Duke is doing a miserable job of it.

It could be that I missed the memo laying out this brave new world of undergraduate education—I’ve never really been in the loop. But for what it’s worth, I’ll outline a few of the ways that Kors’ story clashes with my own experience. I’ve taught traditional music theory classes—thoroughly Eurocentric, if we have to use the word. I also taught Introduction to Jazz, a class that was cross-listed under AAAS. I’ve never imagined that I could arrange, much less coerce, any moral or political enlightenment from the students in my classes. I’m sure it would backfire if I tried, and I’d feel completely ridiculous in the process. If a student of mine has ever felt that they were being judged on some kind of political correctness it was either a misunderstanding or a failure on my part to live up to my professional commitments. I’ve never gotten an overt or covert message that I should teach to an approved ideology. In fact I’ve had closer to the opposite experience—in five semesters teaching Introduction to Jazz, which is a fairly large survey course, I never heard a thing from AAAS about what I should teach, or, for that matter, about anything else. From my experience if there’s a problem it’s the hands-off attitude, not pressure to conform.

As for as my own priorities, I can’t imagine wasting time and energy on indoctrination when I could be digging into the artistic and historical feast of, say, Louis Armstrong’s Dinah (check out the video!), Duke Ellington’s Black and Tan Fantasy, or Charlie Parker’s Ko-Ko, or guiding a class through the quasi-mathematical discipline of sixteenth-century counterpoint. I can’t imagine talking about Beethoven in order to dismiss him as a dead white male any more than I can imagine talking about the blues in order to trivialize it as salacious and primitive. I would hope to challenge students with either attitude to reconsider (last year I put up some thoughts about teaching classical music and the blues as well as a long post about my experience with Introduction to Jazz). I’ve never felt that I was out of step with my colleagues about any of this.

That’s just me, and I’m not denying that there’s a basis for Kors’ complaints. There’s no shortage of anti-Western sentiment in the humanities—some but not all of it is thoughtless and reflexive (it’s not too much for the edifice of Western civilization to bear, as far as I can tell). The clash of values has been heated in music departments—professors are great at turning big ideas and ideologies into a pretext for a turf war, so there’s been pettiness on both sides. But for many of us, if there’s a problem with today’s more inclusive concept of what music is worth studying, it’s that we’ve ended up with an embarrassment of riches.

Kors says, “I fight for intellectual pluralism, for legal equality, and for fairness simply because it is my duty to bear witness to the values I cherish, with no expectation of success.” It would be nice if he didn’t just bear witness but actually put those precious values into practice for the general public to see, instead of insulting them in order to fire up the anti-intellectual enemies of his enemy.

[O’Connor has now responded to this post, or at least complained about it. Her counterargument, if you can call it that, boils down to the observation that Kors is the kind of person that sensible people believe and all I’ve done is throw sour grapes at him. Natually I had to write a followup, too.]

The comment of mine that wasn’t cleared on was rejected by the spam filter on Critical Mass:

DeLater’s impression of present-day academia, even more than Kors’, seems like a comic-book version of reality as I see it. It’s great for nursing grudges and fruitless to argue with.

I read all of Kors’ article after posting my comment. The earlier part, which I liked, is a description of an intellectual climate in which professors fostered intellectualism over ideology and valued independent thought on the part of their students, even encouraged students to follow lines of reasoning that challenged their professor’s political convictions. So it seems that his ideal for the university is very close to mine. I was thinking about that kind of intellectual openness when I commented (tongue in cheek, more or less) about my own relativism.

It’s exactly those values that I can’t reconcile with Johnson’s criticism. His argument is often circular and serious challenges are studiously avoided. And it thrives on false choices like the one implicit in TG’s challenge—to criticize it is not necessarily to make a “pro-Duke 88 argument.” This comment thread isn’t the place to spell the issues out in detail. If you’re interested in the basis for my opinion, go here. But don’t bother if you’ve got the controversy neatly packaged up and you want to keep it that way.

In his few paragraphs of commentary Lindgren reinforces Johnson’s complaint about “unsourced ramblings”—claims made by Wiegman, Lubiano, and Hardt without a citation, especially the ones about vile messages they received. Lindgren is a little more upfront that Johnson about drawing the conclusion that these claims are misleading at best. Johnson, who has a bad habit of falling back on insinuation in place of direct statements he might have to defend, says that “it doesn’t take a Ph.D. to figure out why” there are no citations for “any of these outlandish claims.” I agree that the article alludes to a body of discourse—blogs and other web pages, email, phone messages, and perhaps other mass media—that should at least be described and enumerated more precisely. But scroll down into the comment thread from most any “Group of 88” post on DIW and there’s a generous dose of knee-jerk bile. The urge to denounce, demean, and vilify comes through loud and clear, and also the urge to punish, which is the essence of what the Duke authors call “faux juridicalism.” What difference does it make for that overall picture whether they’ve actually been accused of tax evasion or “typically” been told to get back to the slave quarters?

Lindgren also wonders “whether their complaints about blogs aren’t mostly about commenters to the blogs, rather than the posts of actual bloggers.” The Social Text article is about “the ways in which the contemporary U.S. university has become a target of conservative agendas.” The authors look to “blogs” for a sample of sentiments that are widely shared and so should come through in both posts and comments. A law professor is surely able to wrap his head around the overall line of reasoning and come up with something meaningful to say about, for instance, the authors’ concept of juridical attacks. If that’s too much to expect he should at least be able to find some more significant points to nitpick.

I can see why Lindgren would want to insist on a sharp distinction between blogger and commenter after reading the comments on his post. Some are innocuous enough, and a few are clever and insightful, but for the most part it’s a collection of rhetorical snorts and guffaws—a chummy little festival of ignorance. Nobody’s as self-righteously sure of themselves as the person who has no idea what they don’t know and no interest in finding out. But what self-respecting group of law professors of any political stripe would want to feed and house such a small-minded, anti-intellectual moblet?

The prime example comes from one “Javert”:

Unless one has lived under censorship, it is hard to grasp the chill factor that the G88 created among the students and few faculty who disagreed with them.

I’ll go out on a limb and guess that he wasn’t on campus to experience this chill, or anything else. Could be he’s lived under censorship—you never know. Compare Javert’s fantasy to the comment from Asher.

I go to Duke and was around during the whole flap, and I have to say that, while the signatories of this ad acted in a horribly unprofessional manner…, their sentiments weren’t so far from the student body’s. I never thought the story made much sense, but very few people I knew agreed with me.

It doesn’t sound like he was caught in the grip of a Stalinesque chill. Of course I can’t verify that Asher is actually a Duke student or, for that matter, that Javert isn’t. But I do know that the women’s lacrosse players were students and Nick was a student, that Michael Gustafson is on the faculty and so is the unnamed senior professor I corresponded a little with. All of them disagreed with the “G88” and managed to express their opinion without any serious repercussions.

It’s a pattern I’ve noted before and will likely note again, since I think it’s important. There’s a sense of proportion to the comments and criticisms that come from people who were on campus as the case unfolded, even those who are angry, disappointed, or disgusted that so much of the community turned on the lacrosse team. It seems to me that that sense of proportion is woefully lacking in the average blog hooligan.

[I’ve just noticed a post by Brian Leiter that points to a debate between law professors Eugene Volokh and Cass Sunstein about who’s responsible for the comments on a blog. Leiter also links to an older post about Volokh inciting a kind of comment-thread proxy war on him.]

Anti-intellectualism seems to have a pretty secure home in the American university these days. Washington University in St. Louis has decided to welcome it in broad daylight by handing an honorary degree to hateful paranoid reactionary Phyllis Schlafly. Brian Leiter’s theory is that Washington University is deeply beholden to right-wing donors. Over at Crooked Timber, Kathy G suspects that

[although] at least a few of the board and committee members who voted to honor her are conservatives, I’m willing to bet that the overwhelming majority are not exactly McCain supporters. I’d guess that most of them are liberals of one sort or another, and I suspect the decision to honor Schlafly came out of a misguided attempt to be “fair.” It’s a distressing fact that many liberals, anxious not to be seen as “biased” or as condescending to conservatives, in fact bend over backwards to be “fair and balanced” towards them. Such behavior then allows them to congratulate themselves on their “tolerance” and “open-mindedness.” Though, to be “fair,” so to speak—such behavior does come out of a genuinely decent liberal instinct to be evenhanded.

But this way madness lies. Because, as much as conservatives may whine and scream to the contrary, liberalism and conservatism are not moral equivalents. Because, on the one side you have the thinkers and activists who have advanced freedom, social justice, and human rights, and on the other, you have those who have attempted to thwart all those things. King George III is not the moral equivalent of George Washington. Jefferson Davis is not the moral equivalent of Abraham Lincoln. Joe McCarthy is not the moral equivalent of Walter Reuther. George Wallace is not the moral equivalent of Martin Luther King. And Phyllis Schlafly is not the moral equivalent of Betty Friedan.

So if you’re going to be handing out honorary degrees to political activists, conservatives are always going to come up short. And that is how it should be.

Them’s fightin’ words, and the stage was set for a comment war, liberal v. conservative. I like a good argument as much as anyone else, and this kind can be fun if you’re involved. It’s more of a contact sport than a search for truth, though, and often not so illuminating for the bystanders.

The lacrosse case surfaced as a toss-off from Michael Bérubé:

71. Dan Simon @ 8:

So can we finally end this charade about conservatives being treated as full equals in academia, and being massively underrepresented simply because they’re less interested in intellectual pursuits, or perhaps less intellectually capable than those on the left?

Yes we can. Phyllis Schlafly’s degree should finally bring a definitive end to this charade. Also, Larry Summers and Duke lacrosse team Ward Churchill.

The sarcasm and the reference to conservative hot-buttons was clear enough, but I’m not sure I’d have quite cracked the code on my own. Fortunately Bérubé explained. He was pointing up the way these cases get pulled out of context, blown out of proportion, and treated as representative and generic. For instance, Kathy’s strongly-worded opinion about what sort of political activists should get honorary degrees is transformed by Savage into a revelation about a massive “charade” perpetrated by liberals against all conservative academics.

It seems to me that, especially with her list of diametrical political figures—Jefferson Davis vs. Lincoln, George Wallace vs. MLK, etc.—Kathy invited that kind of escalation. But the Duke case does work well as a shorthand for an incident or controversy that’s hyped to death, its significance inflated by reducing the actors to ideological mannequins (or perfect victims and perfect offenders). Eventually Bérubé takes a jab at the bubble and at the chief academic purveyor of hot air to fill it.

I can’t believe someone would suggest that I am unaware of these players’ innocence. Good lord! The Duke Lacrosse Case is the single most important civil-liberties issue of our time! Is there man, woman, or child alive who does not know of the ordeal these young men have suffered, the inconceivable torture they endured? These people were voiceless, invisible, convicted with no possibility of appeal, not even granted the right to legal representation—until KC Johnson came along, heroically, to suggest that a suspiciously high number of the Gang of 88 had published books with the Duke University Press. And then, at last, justice was done in America.

That works for me as satire, and it’s about as much as you can expect when a fading scandal is being kicked around peripherally in a blog comment thread. Plus it’s nice to see the expression “Gang of 88” pop up in a context that makes it clear what empty-headed scaremongering it is. But until I see more discussion from the Left of the definitive contributions to the fiasco that came from people on their side of the political spectrum, I’ll wince a little at purely partisan impressions of the case.

I’m also wary of staking out the moral high ground for leftists, liberals, progressives or any other political denomination, even in the limited way Kathy does. When it comes to basic human attributes—things like intelligence, fairness, empathy, mental flexibility, generosity, vindictiveness and tolerance for dissent—I think people all across the political spectrum are pretty much the same. With respect to the lacrosse case, there’s a great deal of symmetry between the opposing camps, and unfortunately it’s most obvious with the negatives—irrationality, vindictiveness, and intolerance, not empathy and generosity. I have a feeling that non-ideological traits like those, as much or more than political conviction, determine the moral quality of political debates and acts.

A while back I mentioned an article in the journal Social Text written by Duke professors Robyn Wiegman, Wahneema Lubiano, and Michael Hardt. At the time it seemed strange that several months had gone by since it was published and Johnson hadn’t even mentioned it. This past week he finally posted his ritual demolition, and it bears out my observation that he sometimes reads like a drug-sniffing dog going over a suitcase, oblivious to anything but incriminating evidence. The end product is a list of faults and errors laced with judgmental rhetoric. No effort is made to put the problems into perspective, or for that matter to give more than vague and distorted hints of what the article is about. All he seems to want his audience to know is that—to use the phrase of Lubiano’s that he repeats as a talisman to ward off any flexible or moderate reading of the “listening” statement—it’s about the lacrosse team incident. And it’s wrong about pretty much everything.

No matter how offensive he finds it, it’s no credit to Johnson as an intellectual that he can’t manage more than the shallowest account of the article. The authors’ political slant and their personal stake in shaping perceptions of the controversy are clear enough and well worth scrutinizing. But there’s more to it than that. Broadly speaking, they use the controversy to illuminate the university’s place in the contemporary American political and ideological dynamic, as they see it, in the wake of a shift of activist pressure on the institution from the Left to the Right over the past 50 years or so. I haven’t studied the article that closely, and it’s couched at a level of abstraction that’s too reductive for my taste, but I still find much of it both useful and challenging. What’s especially interesting is their attention to the legalistic spirit of the attacks on left-wing faculty—what they call faux juridicalism. It seems to more or less correspond with what I’ve called vigilantism—a defining feature of the controversy, in my opinion. It’s come from both sides, but the condemnation of college faculty has been especially durable and self-sufficient. As if to prove the point, questions emerged from the DIW commentariat about whether the article might violate last summer’s settlement between the Duke and the three indicted players. “THIS IS A GREAT OPPORTUNITY FOR THE 3 INNOCENT VICTUMS OF THIS FRAUD TO GET TO THE ROOT OF THE PROBLEM! It is time to use the legal system to go after the 88….” Johnson’s response—a “technical note” suggesting that the article was probably written before the settlement and so isn’t covered—is, in its deadpan way, almost as loopy.

I left a comment early in the thread that led to some interesting back-and-forth with Johnson. He posted a lengthy reaction to my criticism as a separate entry, though he’s since moved it into the original comment thread. On the whole it’s informative, especially compared to the boilerplate bluster I’ve come to expect. The most telling error he found in the article is a statement about the change of venue motion—Duke professors didn’t, as the authors claim, appear in the motion because they failed to defend the innocence of the lacrosse players. I suggested that Johnson’s criticism has nonetheless highlighted what he sees as a failure of the faculty to speak up in defense of the students. His response was clarifying—something that’s welcome since in general he does a poor job of differentiating his core issues from his criticism du jour—and on some points I stand corrected.

None of the other factual errors strike me as very significant (I should probably call them alleged errors, since I haven’t looked into them and don’t care to play referee). If they were sloppy, it’s fair to call them on it, and fair to wonder if the sloppiness is a sign of more serious problems. I don’t see how correcting them would undermine any of the authors’ key positions or conclusions, though. And I think it’s up to Johnson to give the reader a reason to care about whether 60 Minutes ran three or five segments about the case or whether it’s legitimate to say that the case cropped up in the “editorial pages of every major newspaper in the country” if there was never an editorial in the New York Times. Otherwise it’s just self-righteous nitpicking. Like so much in Wonderland, the errors are treated as self-evidently bad, but they don’t add up to anything. How could they when in Johnson’s account the article itself doesn’t add up to anything?

In my first comment I listed a number of the errors, each one paired with a closely related statement from the article that is, in my opinion, accurate and more germane (my entire comment is quoted in his response). He claims to agree on every point, but still insists that the errors are damning. He doesn’t address the more general issue I was trying to highlight, that as criticism a bunch of miscellaneous faults with no context doesn’t amount to much (I should probably have made the point more directly).

All this raises the question of whether he’d react as skeptically to similar errors in an article he was friendly to. Based on the one test case I have on hand, the answer seems to be no—there’s no sign Johnson had any reservations about the “perceptive commentary” in Richard Bertrand Spencer’s article in The American Conservative, despite several factual errors and fishy implications. It’s in a partisan, non-academic journal, so I suppose it doesn’t have to meet the same standard as Social Text. But getting the department affiliation of two key professors wrong is pretty sloppy (which isn’t to say that I think it makes sense to point to those errors in isolation as meaningful criticism).

What’s most significant about Johnson’s use of Spencer’s article is not the errors he ignores but the whopper he swallows whole, and with relish. I raised the issue in our recent exchange:

As far as Neal goes, you’ve passed on Richard Bertrand Spencer’s ridiculous assertion that Neal claims to hear a racial epithet “whenever he rolls into the classroom on the first day of class” at Duke. The problem is that it’s based on an article Neal wrote more than a year before he taught his first class at Duke…. Your attack on Holloway’s comments about the women’s lacrosse team is groundless, or at best forced, though that’s a relatively minor point compared to the other misrepresentations you make of her article from summer 06. And you support the dubious claim that Haynie “criticized UPI even though he admitted he hadn’t read the book” by cutting nearly five sentences out of his comment.

His response makes a neat little compilation of his tactics of evasion and denial. Here’s the best part:

I see now that the “errors of fact and interpretation” regarding Neal amount to my “passing on” an article by Richard Spencer (which, for the most part, criticizes Neal by quoting his words) and regarding Holloway amount to my allegedly criticizing her in either a “groundless” or “forced” way. (I should point out that if criticism is “groundless,” it can scarcely be “forced.”) Both the timing of Holloway’s article, and her words, speak for themselves.

The easiest way to deal with criticism is to make it go away, and all it takes here is a little sleight of hand. It’s most transparent when he points to “the article” in place of the actual falsehood that’s at issue. It was originally Spencer’s mistake, of course, but I think it’s reasonable to expect at least a few minutes of googling before ridiculing someone on the basis of outrageous gossip. A few days ago one of Johnson’s readers left a comment here saying he’d “seen [Johnson] make mistakes and correct them promptly and publicly, demonstrating his commitment that getting it right is more important than face-saving rhetoric.” I’ve seen him correct mistakes, too, but apparently his commitment has its limits.

When I posted my first criticism of DIW a few months ago, Johnson expressed great concern about what he saw as “harsh attacks without any corroborating evidence.” It’s funny how little interest he has now that I’ve documented the issues in excruciating detail, but it seems that for him “evidence” is always something someone else has done. In any case, instead of following my link, he repackages my complaint about his criticism of Holloway as vague carping, throwing in a distracting quibble over terminology for good measure. His habit of invoking evidence that “speaks for itself” is not only lazy, it’s a furtive way of pandering to the lowest common denominator audience. Reading obvious and incriminating messages into timing smacks of paranoia, anyways. And if the significance of Holloway’s words is so obvious, why does he have to twist or trivialize them in order to criticize her?

Moving on briefly to Haynie, Johnson manipulates Haynie’s comment even more in order to emphasize what was obvious all along—Haynie said outright that he hadn’t read Until Proven Innocent (UPI). He wasn’t complaining about the book, he was complaining about how “KC Johnson has mischaracterized our committee’s report,” and it’s not necessary to read the book in order to get a fair idea of how Johnson characterizes the report (see the comments on an earlier post for more on this).

Not every item on Johnson’s list is a factual error. The self-righteous complaint that the authors don’t declare outright that the rape allegations were fraudulent is a bit of DIW-standard character prosecution. His reaction to the authors’ account of the email, blog, and phone attacks directed at them is also familiar stuff. I fault people on both sides of the debate for not caring enough about the quality of discourse coming from their own side as well as the other. But if the authors are unjustified in giving the impression that the attacks were a one-way flow from right to left, Johnson is just as unjustified in disowning the problem when he’s been such an enabler.

What’s especially odd is the equivalence he makes between attacks directed at him and those invoked in the Social Text article. It seems to me that he ends up making the opposite case rather effectively. He’s been targeted with plenty of venom, for sure, much of it shallow and vindictive, but the worst examples in the collection he presents are roughly equivalent to the routine characterizations of Lubiano, Holloway, and others coming from the DIW commentariat. Frankly, my expectation is that he’d have been attacked in nastier and more ignorant terms, but he’s clear about setting up this particular compilation as “the facts [that] contradict [the authors’] preferred version of events.” Nothing in his collection approaches the crude and threatening diatribes that Piot relays, for instance (another revealing example is in this Duke Chronicle thread—scroll down to Prasad Kasibhatla, 10/12/07 @ 2:57 PM EST). The difference isn’t subtle, and in fact the desire to punish or silence behind the attacks on female and minority faculty strikes me as an excellent example of the spirit of faux juridicalism. Paraphrasing one of Johnson’s punch lines, the fact that he imagines the attacks directed at him to be comparable to the threatening racist venom directed at some Duke faculty gives a sense of just how skewed and self-important his perspective is.

The last comment I left on DIW has never appeared—either Johnson didn’t clear it or it was lost somewhere in the pipeline. Here’s the main part of it:

Concerning Johnson’s last point (1:28 PM), my actual insinuation was that he’s inclined to quibble literalisticly about distracting technicalities as a way to short-circuit meaningful debate. He’s played his part perfectly (in the 1:18 PM comment as well), but I’ve learned to count on that.

Here’s a bottom-line point I’ve been making about DIW from the time I joined the “Group of 88 rehab tour” late last year—the quality of a great deal of the analysis and criticism is not only poor but anti-academic, and unworthy of a professor of history with a PhD from Harvard. It’s to back that up that I’ve written about Neal and Holloway. Ultimately the quality of any analysis, including Johnson’s and mine, can’t be established by looking at the thing that’s being analyzed. It can’t even be settled by deciding whether it leads to the right conclusions—faulty or shallow reasoning doesn’t automatically give the wrong answer.

I say all that because it seems like the reasoning and rhetoric in DIW should be offensive to defenders of traditional academic and intellectual values. It doesn’t seem to be, though, and I’m curious about how that works. I’d love to see someone defend DIW as a worthy piece of analysis without using what the other side did and how bad it was as a crutch.

No big loss that it was swallowed up—it’s a long shot that I’d get any kind of serious answer. And I’m seriously mystified by the dissonance between DIW’s image in some quarters, as a standard-bearer of academic reform, and the disregard for basic intellectual values of so much of Johnson’s critique. To pick an example more or less at random, there’s English professor Erin O’Connor writing with great admiration about “KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor’s magisterial Until Proven Innocent.” I haven’t had much success at getting blogging academics to take up my question, though.

I got a brush-off from Jeremy Young at Progressive Historians. It’s no surprise considering his unqualified reference to “88 Duke faculty who signed a statement publicly calling three white students rapists”—it’s hard to bridge the gulf between those who get a single, unambiguous message from the “listening” statement (like Johnson and, apparently, Young) and those who don’t (like me). So the gist of his reaction is that he “disagree[s] with [me] about who was most at fault in this case.” My choice to hammer away at Johnson does imply an opinion about what matters, and I can see how that would bother anyone who sees the professors singled out by the controversy as uniformly atrocious. But I’ve explained at some length what I think is at stake, and it clearly doesn’t boil down to who’s most at fault.

Young closes with a coy parenthetical—”(Did I mention that Zimmerman is a professor at Duke?)”—so apparently he’s comfortable with the basic DIW formula—pigeonhole and then dismiss or condemn. If you want to crank out criticism, it’s wonderfully efficient. Doubly so in this case, since it puts me into the “Duke professor” box (I’m not sure exactly what that signifies, but I don’t think it’s a compliment) and at the same time suggests that whatever first-hand experience I might be drawing on is nothing but bias.

What brought Young to my attention was his post last fall titled “Memo To Kc Johnson: Please Get Better Critics.” If only for the selfish reason that I’d appreciate some more original and challenging critics, I’ll amend the memo—he could use better defenders as well. [but please read Young’s constructive comment below.]

Fortunately, another of Johnson’s long-time defenders, Ralph Luker, rose to a higher standard in the testy exchange I had with him. What it came down to in the end is that he’s had enough of the acrimonious debate about the lacrosse case, DIW, and Johnson. I came to it relatively late, and I certainly don’t fault anyone for being burned out.

What drew my interest was a link Luker posted to a New Yorker article about the controversy that’s swirled around Barnard college professor Nadia Abu El-Haj. There are, for me, striking parallels with the lacrosse controversy (it’s a drama that seems to mesh quite well with the analysis of Weigman, Lubiano, and Hardt, too). The description of the attacks on Abu El-Haj by Alan Segal, a senior professor at Barnard, suggests the same self-serving, reductive, partisan reasoning that DIW thrives on—logic that starts with a simplistic model of a scholar in the grip of ideological and political biases and then looks at their work through whatever lens it takes to confirm the premise. I’m disappointed that no one was willing to comment on that, because there is some fine perspective to be had from the Cliopatria crowd. I did myself no favors by coming on so strong, though—I should have asked more questions and made fewer statements.

What stands out from the exchange is this, from Luker:

[Johnson] is probably the most extensively and prestigiously published historian who contributes [to Cliopatria] regularly. You’re welcome to your attack on Harvey Silverglate and FIRE, but they are respectable voices. FIRE’s done some very valuable work in attacking speech codes on our campuses. Check it out.

None of that was news to me. I have checked FIRE out—their cause is a good one, and I don’t doubt they do valuable work. I can’t figure out why they’ve chosen to waste their credibility on empty-headed culture-war cheerleading. And it would save lots of trouble if I could just dismiss Johnson as a fringe scholar. I’m working on the assumption that his scholarship is solid and he’s a fine teacher as well. But I can’t reconcile the approach to evidence and interpretation in his criticism of fellow academics with the sensibility of a professional historian (based on my outsider’s impression, that is). And I can’t reconcile that approach with the essential principles I’d want to communicate in any class that involved reading and critical analysis (if you’re horrified by the idea, rest assured that there are no plans for me to teach such a class). The real and imagined sins of a few dozen Duke professors are beside the point, unless you accept that they’re so dangerous that in order to expose them the ends justify the means—that’s the logic of the culture war, and I don’t think much of it. Otherwise an analysis that modeled such academic virtues as open-mindedness, accurate representation of evidence, responsible rhetoric, and unadulterated curiosity would have served the purpose, and served it much better. I’d curious to hear the perspective on this of anyone—academics especially—who feels that, despite whatever flaws, Johnson’s critique of Duke is a credit to academia.