The grim reality is this: the biggest gains in educational achievement for minority students, especially African Americans, occurred in the 1970s. With the exception of a few years at the turn of the century, progress has stalled nearly everywhere, despite all the hope we’ve put in charter schools and in fads like a much-touted but now-discredited New York experiment (one of the more absurd manifestations of our faith in markets), offering cash incentives to families whose children regularly attend classes.

Why did the racial gap narrow so much in the ’70s—and why has it stalled since? It’s not because the ’70s was a period of great educational innovation. Instead, it was the one moment in recent American history when there was still political will to support educational integration. Around the country through the mid-’70s, school boards, state departments of education, and the federal government supported plans to desegregate schools.

Many of those plans were voluntary: some were court ordered. The road to integration was bumpy—I don’t need to recap the whole busing brouhaha here (except to remind you of Julian Bond’s famous reminder that white folks had no problem putting their kids on buses in all-white suburbs: “it’s not the bus, it’s us.”) Even if it wasn’t a panacea, when it was tried, integration worked. But it wasn’t tried for long.

Since the ’70s, support for integration, except rhetorically, has plummeted. Many black parents were (and are) rightly skeptical of the rhetoric of some integrationists—namely that mere exposure to whites would somehow magically uplift their children. And most whites tell pollsters and survey researchers that they support racial integration, until more than a handful of minority students show up, and then they bolt. The result is that school districts have resegregated. All but the most hardcore advocates of Jim Crow from the Brown v. Board days would be pleased.

Choose the best answer to complete this sentence: According to the author of this passage, all but the most hardcore advocates of Jim Crow would be pleased because…

A) the achievement gap between black and white students hasn’t narrowed since the ’70s.
B) plummeting public support for integration has allowed some school districts to resegregate.
C) the idea that black children will be uplifted by mere exposure to white children strikes some black parents as racist.
D) the Supreme Court recently struck down school integration plans, even when they’re voluntary.

I hope the answer is obvious. But I took out the author’s second to last sentence (I also left out a parenthetical plug for the book The American Dream and the Public Schools). Here’s the full final paragraph:

Since the ’70s, support for integration, except rhetorically, has plummeted. Many black parents were (and are) rightly skeptical of the rhetoric of some integrationists—namely that mere exposure to whites would somehow magically uplift their children. And most whites tell pollsters and survey researchers that they support racial integration, until more than a handful of minority students show up, and then they bolt. The result is that school districts have resegregated. And more recently, the Roberts Court has struck down even voluntary school integration plans. All but the most hardcore advocates of Jim Crow from the Brown v. Board days would be pleased.

Based on the redacted text, the answer to my pretend SAT question is B. Both A and C are vaguely plausible but misconstrue the overall thrust and D comes out of nowhere. D becomes a plausible answer when the sentence I took out is put back in. But is the author — University of Pennsylvania historian Thomas Sugrue — singling out just the court decision for hypothetical praise? It seems to me that he isn’t, that what would please a bunch of moldy old segregationists would be the fact of continued segregation, which in Sugrue’s narrative is reinforced and extended by the court decision.

According to KC Johnson, though, Sugrue is actually “branding the Roberts Court with a Jim Crow brush.” Well, not a brush, exactly, because how do you brand with a brush? What Sugrue is really using is “extraordinarily charged rhetoric.” Johnson made the claim in a post last August on Minding the Campus, and he has no trouble backing it up — he just lifts the two sentences that make his point and ignores everything else (I’ve quoted about a third of Sugrue’s piece).

The core of Johnson’s argument, if you can call it that, is a piece of precision typecasting. He introduces Sugrue as a “serious scholar” who’s produced “first-class work on important topics” — he’s “hardly an academic crank.”

Nonetheless, two recent items from Sugrue have been, to put it mildly, striking. First was his participation in the “Crying Wolf” project, the scheme to pay graduate students and younger professors to produce “research” that conformed to the Wolfers’ political agenda.

Then came this assertion, at Ta-Neishi [sic] Coates’ Atlantic blog: “And more recently, the Roberts Court has struck down even voluntary school integration plans. All but the most hardcore advocates of Jim Crow from the Brown v. Board days would be pleased.”

Though he didn’t link to the decision, Sugrue presumably was referring to Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, in which the Roberts Court struck down a Seattle school-assignment scheme…. […]

People of good faith can, and do, disagree on the merits of the Parents Involved decision. It was, after all, decided by a 5-4 vote…. But could any fair-minded observer seriously maintain that the decision would satisfy “all but the most hardcore advocates from the Brown v. Board days”?

Just as a matter of form I’d expect something like, Sugrue, guest blogging at the Atlantic, wrote a piece lamenting the declining fortunes of school integration. His focus is mainly the Obama administration and the public at large, but he takes one wild jab at the Supreme Court: “And more recently, the Roberts Court…” (I don’t actually think it’s a wild jab at the court, I’m just trying to get into the spirit of Johnson’s post). Coming from Johnson, though, the context-free attack quote is nothing new or surprising. In the closest parallel I know of from the lacrosse case, a nine-word quote is used to show one-sidedness when the message, in context, is exactly the opposite. The one distinctive piece of information Johnson mentions as he frames Sugrue’s quote is the name of the host blogger (it’s Ta-Nehisi Coates, though). Why, of all things, choose that?

Johnson treats the quote as if its meaning is self-evident (it’s not *) but to understand its significance you need to know about the author. You don’t need to know very much, though — just two things. On one hand, he’s a fine scholar who’s written, according to Johnson, “one of the three or four best books currently in print on 20th century American political culture.” On the other hand, his name recently appeared on the list of advisers to this highly questionable “Cry Wolf” project. The contradiction unmasks Sugrue as a particular campus character — the impeccable scholar who, after so much time in the mind-numbing bath of far-left groupthink, has no idea what counts as reasonable in the real world. Bill Chafe is probably the closest counterpart in Johnson’s Wonderland at Duke. But for an example of a professor whose critical intelligence goes out the window when he goes partisan, it’s hard to do better than Johnson himself.

Perhaps Johnson’s easy certainty that he’s ferreted out a cryptic campus radical is an honest reflection of his experience in academia, and it’s hard to argue with experience. Whatever the source of his convictions, though, what he’s articulating is the well-worn logic of a demagogue exposing dangerous subversives. Most of the work is done by the assumptions about the hypnotic effect of groupthink on the left-wing herd. Beyond that, it’s just a matter of milking a tell-tale quote for all it’s worth. It’s easiest to pull off if you believe, and it looks to me like Johnson is totally convinced that the couple of lines of Sugrue’s that reached out and grabbed him are deeply revealing and also completely disconnected from the text they’re embedded in.

The post about Sugrue seems to be an attempt to flesh out Johnson’s claim, in an earlier post, that the participation of scholars of Sugrue’s caliber in the Cry Wolf project “illuminates the depth of the corruption in the contemporary humanities.” The project got a flurry of attention early in the summer, when Andrew Breitbart got hold of an email requesting proposals (read it here). The goal outlined in the email is to build a library of “policy briefs” that could be used to construct counterarguments when conservatives try to shoot down progressive initiatives by “crying wolf.” Inside Higher Ed has a good overview of the flap, which was kind of hot for about a week and played out mostly on Breitbart’s Big Journalism and Minding the Campus (at least that’s what I’ve found of it).

When Patrick Courrielche broke the story, he called the email RFP “a rare look at how progressives and labor unions attempt to manipulate the national media narrative.” And he thought his readers might be surprised that there’s a cerebral side to the labor movement. Labor unions “have always been considered” (by “[m]any conservatives and libertarians,” that is) “the rough and rugged group that intimidate their opponents through the ‘persuasion of power’” — “a swarm of purple shirts, with the forearms of a lumberjack and a penchant for terrorizing teenagers.”

The next day, Kurt Schlichter outlined how the project would threaten the tax exempt status of the project leader’s institution. Like his Big colleague Courrielche, he also used his first paragraph to make it clear that he was dealing with wrong-headed people with an unsavory project.

The ‘Cry Wolf’ leader Professor Peter Dreier has a clear right to solicit all the biased, agenda-driven, fraudulent ‘research’ he desires under the First Amendment of the Constitution he and his pals have so little regard for.

This is just what you’d expect from a media conglomerate run by a man who “want[s] it to be in the history books that [he] took down the institutional left” — he’s no Arnold B. Truthington of Accuracy Lane, nor are his writers. That’s not to say that no legitimate issues were raised in the dozen-plus pieces Big Journalism ran about Cry Wolf — some of Schlichter’s points might have merit, for instance. But he and Courrielche are up front about their Big Bias, and I appreciate that — it saves me the trouble of trying to sort the truth from the fantasy and fabrication.

Big Journalism isn’t all slick polemic, though. There’s also room for a plain-speaking Tea Partier like Liberty Chick. And it turns out that the less you know about actual research at actual universities, the more clearly you can see how vastly catastrophic this thing is.

A small committee of professors and academic professionals, normally held in high regard, have blatantly betrayed the trust of the public and quite possibly smeared the reputations of all colleges and universities nationwide. By soliciting “paid activists” to create research papers that are intentionally designed to silence opposing viewpoints, they have undermined the political system and manipulated the governmental policy making process.

In fact, these “so-called scholars… intend to ‘undermine the credibility and arguments’ of those who happen to hold opposing viewpoints to theirs” (**). Liberty Chick misses their even wilder claim, that they’ll do it with 2000 word “policy briefs” that are “well documented and scrupulously accurate.” Everybody knows that real Americans who love their country (and the First Amendment) undermine their opponents with poisonous rhetoric and brutally edited videotapes. These so-called scholars, it’s clear, must be stopped, or else.

The critics with university connections aren’t quite so scattershot, they’re a little smarter about context, and they raise some plausible issues on the margins. Basically, though, the two with the most to say were happy to cry wolf along with Breitbart. The way Erin O’Connor reads the Cry Wolf email, it’s asking researchers “to scramble the difference between disinterested scholarship and agenda-driven advocacy work.” For KC Johnson, the bottom line is that the project “imperils academic integrity” (or at least “little doubt exists” that it does — these things have to be properly hedged). It’s “faux scholarship” based on an “Alice-in-Wonderland conception of what constitutes academic research,” since the conclusion is preordained, and of course with these shifty leftists it’s always Wonderland one way or another.

Is it really so hard to tell the difference between original, peer-reviewed research in the social sciences and a policy brief that draws on that literature? Apparently these critics believe that it is. It’s hard to tell, though, because they never get real about what they expect the Cry Wolf briefs to look like and what sort of scholarship would be scrambled or undermined. Their case is strictly pie-in-the-sky — “disinterested scholarship,” “academic integrity,” “academic freedom” and the “search for truth.” Vocabulary notwithstanding, they’re either as starry-eyed as Liberty Chick or they’re playing dumb.

They also failed to get real about the intermixing of scholarship and partisanship, something that no writer on Minding the Campus can claim to be ignorant about. The site is a wing of the Manhattan Institute. According to a New York Times piece they proudly quote, the Manhattan Institute’s VERITAS project is in the business of “finding like-minded tenured professors and helping them establish academic beachheads for their ideas….” (my favorite part is that they’re hoping to bring back “a triumphal interpretation of American history” — it’s not so much about the issues, I guess, as about the poor old boys’ battered egos). I’m not bringing VERITAS up because it’s equivalent to Cry Wolf — it’s not at all. Other conservative initiatives might be — Inside Higher Ed has a little about that. All I want to suggest is that if the institute really believes in “offering an engaged debate for readers concerned with the state of the modern university” and all that other high-minded stuff on the “About Us” page for Minding the Campus, they’d put the issues in context and they’d put their cards on the table. Most of the time, from what I’ve seen, the site is just a mild-mannered cousin to Fox and Breitbart, far more interested in rhetorical leverage than anything else.

On Cry Wolf, though, O’Connor was the main academic water carrier for Breitbart (she’s not on Minding the Campus but on her own blog). After about a day of following the story on Big Journalism she was wondering why all she heard from the rest of the academic world was “thunderous silence.” When were the institutions involved going to distance themselves from the “blatant political advocacy work” and “initiate disciplinary proceedings”? It was like she was taking her cues from Liberty Chick, who feared that the Wolfers “risked discrediting the entire educational sector as a respectable source for research.” All that for a mere $50K! That’s a lot of bang for the buck. VERITAS couldn’t even manage to buy triumphalism at Cornell for $50K.

* Who do you end up with when you take the “advocates of Jim Crow” and set aside “all but the most hardcore”? For me that calls up the folks who voted enthusiastically for the likes of Orville Faubus and George Wallace — a whole lot of very ordinary white southerners, including a number of my relatives — and excludes the ones who were willing to bomb a church. It seems to me that Sugrue’s “extraordinarily charged” rhetorical flourish is highlighting the irony of all that water under the bridge — four decades worth — and so little to show for it. Beyond that, all I see is the uncontroversial claim that segregationists would be pleased by segregation. (go back ^)

** Actually, the Cry Wolf organizers are more specific about whose credibility and arguments they hope to undermine. It’s not “those who happen to hold opposing viewpoints,” as Liberty Chick writes. That would be so mean, to pick on people for views they just happen to hold. It’s “the organizations and individuals who use such dire social and economic prognostications to thwart progressive reform” that they’re going after. (go back ^)

“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…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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