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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am put in my place

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A most peculiar form of weasel-speak

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fighting groupthink with bullshit

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

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

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

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

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

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

The victim game

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

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

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

Afterthought: the May pile-on

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOTES

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

2. Like this one. (back)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Snore.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Duke’s African and African American Studies Department is getting a new chairman from Harvard—the devil incarnate, er, I mean, J. Lorand Matory. According to KC Johnson, who should know, since it’s his alma mater, “Matory’s damage to Harvard was incalculable.” The “was” is premature, though—he’s got about half a year to put the finishing touches on his project up there, and then he’ll transfer the effort to our lil’ ol’ backwater down south. Matory is clearly a controversial figure, and I don’t mean to suggest that Johnson’s complaints and concerns are groundless. But he’s been crying wolf for two and a half years now—it’s not very motivating.

Matory is the main subject of the latest post on Durham-in-Wonderland (DIW), but after railing about him for a while Johnson turns to an old favorite, a past chair of AAAS, in fact—Karla Holloway. Her latest transgression is “propos[ing] a ‘diversity’ crusade targeting units of the university whose ‘diversity’ performance the 88'er deems insufficient.” It’s in the latest Chronicle of Higher Education, and since the article isn’t freely available I’ve appended the section about Duke to the end of my post. [A reader pointed out that in fact it is freely available.]

In the comments on DIW, someone has taken Johnson to task for framing Holloway’s remarks as a “crusade.” The two had a funny little exchange, totally at cross-purposes. It’s so much like the ones I’ve been part of that someone else speculates that the annoying questioner is actually “the reharmonizer man parsing words again in order to try to cover for his 88 friends.” Now I don’t know about the 88 friends. I’m here at the computer all day and half the night, typing away, and do they ever find the time to call, or even email a line or two? Of course not. But it is true that I get all fussy about words, and it’s nice to see that there’s at least one other person with the same problem. (Maybe what Ralph, my most diligent commenter, has been trying to do all this time is teach me how to read DIW. If so, the secret is to just accept that Johnson is absolutely right about the important issues and then go with your gut instincts. All the words have to do is move you in the right general direction.)

Anyone who’s paying attention should be able to see that the anonymous questioner in this case is briefer than I’ve ever managed to be, and also a bit more guarded. In fact, the back-and-forth makes more sense if one side is expanded and the other is compressed, with some artistic license taken to bring out the essence. Then it goes something like this:

Anonymous: OK, is this the article you’re talking about? The one where Karla Holloway says that minority hiring has gone better in some parts of the university than in others, and she’d like to see some changes? She’s answering a reporter’s question and suddenly its a “diversity” crusade!? How can anyone take you seriously if you totally blow things out of proportion like that?

Johnson: Huh? Look what it says here—each unit should be held accountable! And then there’s some stuff about the Law school! What, do you think she’d bother with Divinity?

Anon: Whatever. Could you just tell us what makes it a crusade?

Johnson: You talking to me? Listen, why would she be saying all this if she didn’t expect Duke to get with her program? It’ll screw things up just like it did at VA Tech, but that won’t stop her.

I don’t know whether he’s just stonewalling or he really can’t imagine how a sensible person could be bothered when he takes a straightforward opinion given in an interview and translates it into a crusade. But as I’ve said before, Johnson reads Holloway as a stereotype, and the reaction seems to be almost Pavlovian. Is there a way for the woman to just express an opinion? If she’s overheard grumbling that you really should be able to get better coffee on East campus, would that mean a coffee diversity crusade is brewing? OK, probably not. But never underestimate how far out those wacky Wonderland characters will get.

From the Chronicle of Higher Education, September 26, 2008—Whatever Happened to All Those Plans to Hire More Minority Professors? by Ben Gose.

Duke U.: Success rates vary by discipline

The black faculty Strategic Initiative began in 1993, on the heels of the failed effort to add at least one black professor to every department.

As of the fall of 2007, Duke had 62 tenured or tenure-track black professors, accounting for 4.5 percent of the faculty. But while the raw number is double that of 20 years ago, it masks tremendous variation within the university. Black professors remain rare in the law school, which has one black professor, the business school, with two, and the natural sciences, with three.

Karla FC Holloway, an English professor who served as dean of humanities and social sciences from 1999 to 2005, says each unit of the university should be held accountable for its record on diversity. “There has been growth in arts and social sciences, and medicine, but in some ways that growth has arguably allowed other schools or divisions not to work as aggressively with this effort,” she says.

Mr. Lange, the provost, concedes that some parts of the university have fallen short. He says he is working closely on the issue with the law school’s dean, David F. Levi, and other officials. “They have made offers and have not been successful at times,” Mr. Lange says. “They’re putting in a lot of effort to do better.”

Duke makes sure that when black job applicants visit the campus, they meet other black faculty members — and not just potential colleagues in the department to which they’re applying. The university also is taking small steps to widen the pipeline. Duke has financed two postdoctoral positions for minority candidates each year, with the hope that it will eventually hire some of them for tenure-track faculty positions.

In 2003, Duke started yet another faculty initiative related to diversity — but this time the scope was expanded to include women and all underrepresented minority groups. “We needed to recognize that diversity had come to include a substantially broader set of concerns,” Mr. Lange says.

Ms. Holloway worries that the broader focus may give deans and department chairs an out: “People can say, ‘I’ve hired enough women, and that makes up for the lack of minorities.’”

The highest concentration of intelligent criticism that I know of, pro and con, focussed on DIW is on Scott Eric Kaufman’s blog Acephalous—four posts from last fall, each followed by an astonishingly long comment thread with some very sharp participants, including Kaufman, Ralph Luker, Timothy Burke, and Steven Horwitz. Johnson chimes in with a useful response now and then, too. It’s an academic crowd, and there’s plenty of shop talk, kicking around things like faculty publication records and the significance of publishing with Duke University Press vs. some other academic press. But many of the broader issues raised by Johnson’s blog come up for unusually thoughtful consideration.

In his posts, Kaufman picks out several passages from DIW in order to point out a kind of manipulative criticism that he calls Horowitizian (“intentionally withholding profession-specific information when speaking before a general audience in order to incite it to commit acts of rhetorical violence”). It’s basically bullshitting by omission, and Kaufman’s detail-oriented look at Johnson’s Horowitzian attacks on Joseph Harris would fit right in with the bullshit I listed in my last post.

I appreciate Kaufman’s attention to the mechanics of Johnson’s argument and the details of his language. It’s a kind of analysis that I’m drawn to, though it seems to do nothing but mystify my readers. Digging into “evidence” in that way is not a problem. There’s no shortage of interest in elaborate dissections of the “listening” statement, for example, I think because it’s seen as the smoking gun that revealed the true nature of the faculty members who endorsed it—it’s been invested with a lot of significance. If I argue against the conventional wisdom about that ad, I can depend on lots of responses. On the other hand, when I’ve gone through Johnson’s evidence and conclusions point by point and found misrepresentation, shoddy reasoning, and underhanded rhetoric, I’ve heard very little. One post that I consider pretty damning got no response at all. I don’t mean this as an indictment—Kaufman’s attention to detail didn’t carry over into his comment threads, either. It makes perfect sense that the debate should gravitate towards hot-button issues, judgments about guilt and innocence, and rhetorical tone. That’s what happens here, and it’s what happened on Acephalous. Nonetheless, it seems to me that the real measure of DIW is in the details—deception and manipulation is awfully easy to come by.

Besides the evidence that so often turns out to be bullshit, there’s a whole lot of rhetorical inflection. Kaufman points out in a comment addressed to Johnson that “when you insert ‘[naturally]’ into any quoted material having to do with race/class/gender, you’re playing to a very particular crowd” (see, for example, the DIW posts on Joseph Harris and Sally Deutch). With his focus on the arcane “profession-specific information” in DIW, Kaufman is looking at the tip of the iceberg—Johnson constantly refers to race/class/gender this or that without the [naturally], and on the other hand his text is sprinkled liberally with “of course,” an expletive that does the same work as naturally. Overall he’s anything but subtle with his expletives—“as usual,” “no doubt,” “after all,” “in fact,” and “indeed” also get a good workout (and of course there are more where those came from). But Kaufman is right that with “[naturally]”, Johnson signals that he’s producing fodder and not analysis.

It’s too bad Kaufman didn’t do more analysis along the same lines, since it seems to be right up his academic alley. It’s not my area of expertise at all, but as I’ve read DIW I’ve become more and more aware of how much attitude and interpretation is telegraphed by the rhetoric. I’ve written about a few examples. One is from a DIW post about a public forum that got preachy about Duke’s “culture of crassness” but featured a professor whose DIW profile is notably crass. According to Johnson, it’s an irony that’s “worth pondering.” When it comes up again a few months later, it’s “worth remembering.” It turns out that Johnson flags a lot of things that are worth remembering, or else worth recalling or considering or pondering or noting or asking or pointing out. My feeling is that it’s worth asking why the remembering or considering or whatever is worth doing, and also why the readers need so much prompting to do it. The heavy hinting says a lot about what Johnson really wants to communicate, and about his willingness to ride herd on his readers, to keep them on the same page as him, so to speak.

Johnson’s most characteristic rhetorical tic is his habit of referring to people as “the same so-and-so who….” Even more than signposting everything that’s “worth remembering,” it’s a courtroom affectation—added proof that Johnson is more prosecutor than analyst. There’s a post about the Michael Vick scandal that bring this out because the rhetoric is switched on abruptly near the end. It’s a survey of the many references to the lacrosse case in articles about the Vick case, under the general heading of lessons learned. Most of the way through it’s a straightforward and informative analysis—a welcome break from the usual polemic. Then comes the last section, about “those who seemed to learn nothing from the Duke case,” especially “the same Lester Munson.” That part seems to be addressing the ladies and gentlemen of the jury.

The formula isn’t applied to professors as much as others—for some reason former Durham city manager Patrick Baker is a favorite target. But “Yes, this is the same Orin Starn who…,” and “This is, after all, the same Grant Farred who…,” and “This, of course, is the same William Chafe who…” (as you can see, there’s usually a heavy-handed expletive thrown in, as if the message wasn’t clear enough already). What follows is some transgression that same person committed. It might or might not be relevant to the discussion at hand, but either way it’s a reminder of what kind of person is being discussed. The prime offenders get a whole rap sheet in bullet points—“the same Karla Holloway” (this one, too) and “the same Wahneema Lubiano” (and again). Is there really another Wahneema Lubiano? It’s hard to imagine.

Rhetorical signals like “of course” telegraph an understanding of the material by marking the things that are routine and undeniable. “The same so-and-so” sends a similar message—something about the routine or inevitable behavior of the offender who’s been singled out. I’ve written a little about one of the saming attacks against Lubiano. In that case the message is that if she could do the things on this list, how could anyone doubt that she truly believed that the lacrosse players were “perfect offenders,” and also what kind of nutcase would criticize KC Johnson instead of her? Logically it’s an elaborate non sequitur, but then one reason rhetoric has a bad reputation is that it’s so good at glossing over faulty logic. In DIW it compliments the bullshit evidence—both allow Johnson to take a foregone conclusion and build something that looks like a line of reasoning supporting it. It gets the message across to anyone with ears for it, that’s for sure. But the constant rhetorical cueing strikes me as reflexive. That makes it a pretty good window onto the thought process behind the words, and it looks like Johnson has spent a lot of time trudging up and down the same narrow mental corridors, watching the same one-dimensional characters do their senseless but predictable thing.

DIW wasn’t written in Durham. Very little of it is the product of first-hand experience or investigation. The raw material is mostly texts of one kind or another—news reports, essays, editorials, press releases, blog posts, email, CVs, syllabi, Duke’s (or Durham’s) routine documentation of it’s own institutional structure and history, etc. The criminal investigation produced its own quintessential sort of evidence, but most of us—and as far as I can tell that includes Johnson—still got it second-hand, as news or some other kind of write-up. I don’t see any big problems with his treatment of the criminal evidence, though I haven’t really looked. On the academic side of the analysis there are a few odds and ends besides text—some photographs, for instance, and the audio and video in radio and TV news reports—and it’s my sense that he had local sources who relayed their impressions. Presumably he learned things in his visits to Durham and in the interviews he conducted for his book, and some of that filtered into the blog. Based on the source notes, the bulk of the interviews were with people affiliated with the lacrosse team or else on it. It’s hard to imagine he ended up with anything that could remotely substitute for his lack of firsthand experience with the campus and the city in the grip of the scandal.

I’ve found no indication that Johnson questions much of anything as long as it sounds right and can be passed off as legitimate news. Every now and then he reveals what uncritical or even opportunistic faith he has in the stream of second-hand information he mines for evidence. In a January 2007 editorial, Cathy Davidson claims to have been “listening to the anguish of students who felt demeaned by racist and sexist remarks swirling around in the media and on the campus quad in the aftermath of what happened on March 13 in the lacrosse house.” Johnson flatly dismisses the claim—the only nasty remarks he heard about went in the other direction. There are clear signs that in the 9 months before writing her editorial, Davidson might have lost track of what happened when, so a healthy dose of skepticism is justified. But it still seems rash to say that someone who was on the scene couldn’t have heard what they say they heard because nothing like that was reported on the news. And I think it’s also unrealistic to imagine that all the nasty rhetoric was flowing in one direction.

The potbanger’s “Castrate” banner is an artifact of the case that an honest critic has to approach with extra care. It stands out as especially provocative, even in comparison to the other angry, judgmental slogans from the protest, and unlike those other slogans, nobody was talking about it until about six months after the event (that’s based on what I found in DIW, Liestoppers, and other blogs and boards). Johnson didn’t pick up on it until January 2007, when, with no explanation or analysis, he started using it for character-assassinating insinuation (Cathy Davidson was the first target). There has to be a lot of story behind that banner—how did it end up at the protest? where and how long was it displayed? why didn’t it crop up in discussions of the case until a picture of it appeared on Liestoppers in Nov. 2006? (My big question, which goes beyond basic context, is how the hell it was rationalized.) None of that gets a moment’s attention on DIW. The picture exists, and it seems that any further exploration would be irrelevant, or a distraction, and might even make it harder to stigmatize the people Johnson really wants to get—professors, not protesters. So Johnson’s approach to this especially hot piece of evidence is to cultivate ignorance, and it’s not the only time he does that. How much more anti-intellectual can you get?

There’s a revealing statement in Johnson’s response to some of those points: “This protest was covered on all four Triangle TV stations (with live shots on at least two). It appears now as if you’re suggesting that the contemporaneous press coverage of the potbangers somehow might have fooled the Group….” Besides the fact that I never made a claim even remotely like that, the idea that the 88 professors who signed the “listening” statement were sitting around watching the local TV news is laughable. It is to me, at least, and I know the reaction may say more about me than anything else, but I can’t image why anyone with half a brain would voluntarily watch that stuff. Anyway, I don’t see any signs that it occurs to Johnson there’s a question—his attitude seems to be that if he gets his information that way, everyone else does, too (or they should). It’s an assumption that simplifies things quite a bit, especially if you want to say what a bunch of other people should have known and can be held responsible for.

Only so much reality can fit into a news report, no matter what the medium, and it will inevitably be colored by a whole range of technical, institutional, and personal limitations and biases (his approach to the TV news story that quoted Brodhead about what’s “bad enough” is another example). Johnson has observed events in Durham through a lens that naturally emphasizes outrage and scandal and sublimates whatever’s mundane and ambiguous. As far as I can tell he doesn’t bother himself about the problems of working from such a mediated version of reality. To uncritically accept so much prefiltering is intellectually indefensible, not to mention lazy. It’s also expedient, but I think it’s fair to expect a little more mental fortitude from a man with a PhD in history.

This kind of mental laziness is one of the big factors contributing to lacrosse-case tunnel vision, a syndrome that leads people to draw sweeping conclusions about Duke and Durham based on their highly charged but generally second-hand impressions of a speck called the Duke lacrosse case. I’ve noted several times how much much more cogent and grounded criticism tends to be when it comes from people who were on the scene. There are exceptions, but usually there’s a sense of proportion that comes with firsthand experience of the place and time. That’s not the kind of thing you should expect in Wonderland, though.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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.