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 ^)

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

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

[Update below]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s the whole exchange between me and Johnson.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To Prof. Zimmerman:

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

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)

The 2006 Lacrosse incident thrust the disruptive and abusive behaviors caused by Duke party houses into a harsh national media spotlight. Although this incident had enormous negative consequences — legal and financial — for both Duke and Durham, it is by no means clear that Duke has yet enacted any major changes of policy for off-campus student life in response. Fraternity-sponsored parties remain a chronic disruption in neighborhoods adjacent to Duke’s East Campus.

As KC points out, the first sentence “provides what could charitably be described as an unusual take on the legacy of the lacrosse case” (my emphasis), while the second sentence implies there’s some kind of connection between Duke’s policy for off-campus life and the negative consequences of what they delicately refer to as the “2006 Lacrosse incident.” You know what they were thinking — let’s make Duke think that the lacrosse case was just some off-campus party that went bad and then they’ll clamp down on these kids. After all, “we have young children to raise, jobs to do and classes to teach.” Gimme Gimme Gimme!

It’s something that can only be described as an “unusual linkage” — KC hits the nail on the head, once again. And as usual the syllabus-deviating Trinity Park wannabes responsible for this so-called report haven’t answered his email. The real lessons of the lacrosse case are, as he points out, “no apparent concern of the Trinity Heights Action Committee.” They just want their little “party problem” taken care of, pronto.

It’s clear that KC’s job won’t be done until, at the mere mention of the lacrosse case (or at any invitation to “swagger like us” from an African American student organization), the entire Duke faculty stops, drops, and rolls, chanting in unison, “I will not be taken in by the culture of groupthink or violate the handbook, I will not be taken in by the culture of groupthink or violate the handbook, I will not be taken in by the culture of groupthink or violate the handbook…” There’s just nothing too … peculiar … for these folks. So keep up the good work!

It comes by way of Bill Anderson, based on “a conversation with a prominent Duke faculty member the other day.” According to Anderson this source heard Karla Holloway express a continued belief in the guilt of the three indicted lacrosse players, and she supposedly followed the claim up with some nonsense about “guilt as a social construct.” A long time ago I wrote that criticism flowed in and out of DIW like gossip, but this is ridiculous.

[Update: I’ve just received an email from Karla Holloway. In it, she says that Anderson’s claim is “an absolute and patent falsehood,” that he’s “reporting a conversation that could never have taken place” and that it “misrepresents [her] views.”]

It isn’t the first time that Anderson has claimed to be privy to the inside scoop on Holloway, either. He floated a rumor a couple of years ago (more recently, I’m sorry to say, he slipped it into my blog, too) that she “fixed” a sexual assault charge against a colleague. The two rumors are quite a combo—they make Holloway out to be an ultra dogmatic leftist feminist who’s also an utter hypocrite. Stranger things have happened, so I won’t claim it’s impossible. I don’t find either the new or the old claim to be credible. Even if I did, I can’t imagine why anyone in their right mind would circulate such a story as hearsay.

I’ve had some long go-rounds with Bill Anderson. He can seem like a reasonably intelligent, thoughtful, and even gracious person at times. He’s also capable of passing wild judgments on the people he sees as ideological enemies, and of convincing himself that they’ve thought or said things that he’s in no position to know. The most jaw-dropping example I know of is a wild post on the Liestoppers forum last July, asserting, based on his understanding of the way those kind of people think, that local African American leaders had a supremely callous attitude towards the murder of Eve Carson.

Let us be honest here. There is a portion of Durham—and that includes Irving Joyner—that has an underlying approval for what was done to Eve Carson. I am not saying that Joyner approved of her murder, but he has said nothing that goes to the heart of the situation. He sees himself as a guardian of African-Americans in Durham, and I would not be surprised if he was hoping for an act of jury nullification so Atwater and Lovette could be set free.

Let us not forget that Joyner, McSurely, and the NAACP held that the biggest threat to Durham was the Duke lacrosse team. They desperately wanted these young men railroaded to prison, and in their minds, if Lovette and Atwater are acquitted despite the evidence against them, it will be a “fair trade” to the AA community for the lacrosse players not going to prison. Don’t kid yourself; this is how people like Joyner, Barber, and others think.

With respect to the latest claim about Holloway, Anderson assures us that his source “was not exaggerating, and he is an accomplished academic and not given to loose talk.” I don’t find that very reassuring.

ANOTHER UPDATE

There’s an update on KC Johnson’s post that registers the message I got from Karla Holloway. He also left a comment here, proving himself yet again to be a petty demogogue whose answer to any question or criticism is to point at someone else.

He starts the comment with a classic of sleazeball journalism à la O’Reilly—the “invitation” given out to someone whose been trashed, kindly allowing them to explain their side and get trashed some more. Then he takes up two questions I recently posed in a comment on the Duke Chronicle. True to form, he has no real answer to the first one except packages his denial with the non sequitur suggestion that the “Group of 88” did worse things. On the second question, he points to the other guy (formerly the “towering figure”)—it’s his fault.

Q: Did Johnson end our exchange of comments on DIW with a moderator’s veto? A: He doesn’t know He didn’t, “to the best of [his] knowledge,” but never mind that—the Group of 88 hasn’t defended anything they did, and Zimmerman is a public apologist for them.

Q: Why didn’t Johnson engage any critical reflection after Jim Coleman criticized him? A: It was up to Coleman, apparently, to translate the criticism into chapter and verse in DIW or UPI. Since he didn’t “corroborate his claims,” Johnson can do nothing but wonder why on earth would say such things.

Finally, he adds a paragraph about me, the messenger. In the lacrosse case, he says, the DA was trying to “railroad three innocent students at Prof. Zimmerman’s own institution. During the time those students were in harm’s way, Prof. Zimmerman… was silent about their fate, while 88 of his colleagues signed a public statement which… thanked protesters who had presumed the students’ guilt.” A year and a half ago I pointed out his habit of responding to challenges by pulling out that the formulaic indictment of the 88. He’s still at it. In this case it’s pure ad hominem—a lazy and cowardly response that discredits the messenger in order to deflect the message. And it’s especially effective with the thoughtless and bigoted.

Speaking of cowardly, his first order of business in the update on DIW is to pigeonhole me (“Group apologist Robert Zimmerman reports that he has received an email from Karla Holloway….”), but then he doesn’t have the guts to link to my post. It certainly calls for a link, and there’s even some bullshit in his comment here about public service I’m doing by revealing the (fictional) Group’s thinking. It won’t do them any good if they can’t find me.

The comment is down here. [Further comment/clarification from Johnson is here and here. My reply to the last of those sums up this incident of an uncleared comment, as I see it.]

A natural place to look for guidance is “Liberal Education, Then and Now,” by Peter Berkowitz, the featured essay on the site’s “Must Reads” list. It’s a solid and constructive piece, but the lecture that it’s based on had a more accurate title—“John Stuart Mill’s Idea of a University, and Our Own.” The “Then” that Berkowitz contrasts with our degenerate “Now” isn’t a real place and time, it’s an ideal. It may well be that universities used to embody Mill’s ideal much better than they do now, but Berkowitz has nothing to say about that.

Another professor and public intellectual, D. G. Myers, appreciates Johnson’s vote of confidence for the conservative side in the battle of ideas but he’s not optimistic about those “intriguing possibilities” offered by Obama. The issues enumerated in Johnson’s essay are, for Myers, symptoms of a deeper problem—“the loss of the university principle altogether.”

The current principle animating university life in America is the social principle. The contemporary university is a little society, a self-contained and self-governing body of people living together, where one behaves oneself in accord with common rules so as not to disturb or offend any other residents of the community.

Hence collegiality, an irrelevant value in scholarship, becomes a minimum standard for participation in academic society. […]

Since university professors are social beings just like everyone else (ok, maybe not just like everyone else), it’s hard to imagine that this “social principle” wasn’t a factor until the last generation or so. The “principle animating university life” undoubtedly shifts over time, but in the picture Myers paints few things are a matter of degree.

Where the social principle animates the university, collegiality and the concern for other people’s feelings will be minimum standards. The highest standard, then, will be sophistication. […]

Sophistication is a social attainment. It is a class marker. You know the correct names, you use the correct pronunciation, you quote the correct books. You are not guileless and direct, but subtle and (if possible) ironic. Sophistication is the sworn enemy of truth, because truth can be rude and boisterous and may speak with an accent.

It seems to me that he’s eliding two kinds of sophistication. One is the kind that makes for a sophisticate—a person who’s fashionable and in the know. The other is the kind that, in my opinion but apparently not in his, is a hallmark of a lot of outstanding scholarship and criticism—the opposite of rudimentary and simplistic, not the opposite of “rude and boisterous.” I guess Myers is pointing out a recent twist in the long history of people valuing style over substance, a complacent habit that academics, of all people, should be able to resist. But in that department, the failures come from all over the political spectrum.

Before the current crop of social-thinking sophisticates, there was, according to Myers, the “old idea of the university as a common pursuit of truth.” The university has changed quite a bit over the past few generations, for sure. It seems to me that it’s no easy thing to get a fix on its true character and ethos at any given time, but I doubt it was ever much less “self-contained” and “self-governing,” and I doubt that professors in the olden days were a lot more disturbing and offensive (in my experience, plenty of them still have that effect on each other).

Alan Kors gives an evocative account of the “academic world [in the early 1960s] that won the heart of a kid from Jersey City’s hardscrabble Dickinson High School,” but he puts it in perspective with a forthright look at its dark side.

It was virtually impossible for the most qualified black applicants to gain admission to Princeton; there were exceptions, but they were few indeed. There was widespread, crude racial bigotry among students; there was contempt for the women imported into Princeton on weekends, with a sharp division made between those gentlewomen one might marry and those coeds to whom anything might be promised for favors (“Sweet Briar to wed; Trenton to bed” was one of the politer formulations); there was a vulgar, sadistically cruel, and, indeed, violent hatred of homosexuals there, with exceptions occasionally made for reasons of social class. There was an anti-intellectualism in the student body that astonished me, a lack of interest in all but the most famous speakers or performers, and—the terms truly were used—a contempt by those pleased by “gentlemen’s Cs” for those “grinds” who studied long hours or with enthusiasm. There was a social snobbery more reminiscent now of the 1920s than of anything more recent, and an emphasis on “seeming” over “being” that would have confirmed Rousseau for his later admirers. My freshman year was Princeton’s final year of mandatory chapel (of one’s choice, at least)—a requirement I found deeply intrusive, although they’d advertised it fairly enough—but if exposure to spirituality were meant in any way to replace coarseness with kindness and decency, mandatory chapel was without value. That Princeton also was a place of undergraduate political intolerance. In my junior year, the rooms of two quite thoughtful, warm, bright, and intellectual Marxist seniors were broken into, their “Little Lenin Library” ripped to shreds, and the sole copies of their applications to graduate schools ruined by bottles of ink. The perpetrators turned out to be some of the “biggest men” on campus, and they all were let off with barely a slap on the wrist. That was no golden age, and honest souls across the political spectrum never will talk realistically about the tragedy of higher education today without acknowledging that moral and historical reality.

That’s mostly a description of the students of the day, presented in contrast to the more cerebral faculty. But on the whole the two groups shared the same social values and prejudices, and the student body acted as a kind of buffer zone between the faculty and society at large. A “common pursuit of truth” was a lot easier when the academic world was smaller and more homogeneous. Factoring that in is the way to “acknowledg[e] that moral and historical reality” if you want to compare higher education then and now and keep it real. Otherwise the declensionist narrative is a way of tacitly pining for homogeneity, and for the rigid, irrational hierarchies that produced it.

[Myers responded to this post about a month after it went up, or at least he referred to it as an accusation that he was “pushing aside history and yearning for a Golden Age that never existed.” I guess my post was useful as a way for him to document the weight of misunderstanding that he suffers as he bucks the ill winds of change. He doesn’t bother to respond to the substance of my criticism, which is a shame—that might have been interesting. Instead he repeats the story line about a university that’s “transforming itself” from one thing to another (which means that he’s not just talking about “the idea of the university,” as he claims), and complains bitterly but impotently about how it’s become the wrong thing (and though he writes about transformation at one point, when he gets down to it there seems to be no middle ground).]

I’m not thinking about the ignorant ranters who are ready with a knee-jerk response on most any political topic. I’m thinking about people who work in or around academia, especially those who are inclined to translate their dissatisfaction into a program for reform, though a lot of the time the difference between these more informed critics and the random ranters is not all that clear. My theory is that what the reform movement stands for is more subtle and a lot less compelling than what it stands against—a litany of outrageous incidents involving scary, muddle-headed tenured radicals and the craven administrators who do their dirty work. Without the radicals to generate fear and loathing, the movement has little claim to public attention. The point man in pressing the lacrosse case into service for the cause is KC Johnson, but his crusade is larger than that one scandal and, as I’ve pointed out in the last two entries, he’s just as nonsensical and unprincipled when he’s pursuing other targets.

About a month ago the web site Minding the Campus ran an essay of his, “Obama And The Campus Left.” It’s a post-election look at the “intriguing possibilities” for “meaningful reform on the nation’s college campuses” under the new administration. It overlaps quite a bit with pieces of his that I’ve already written more than enough about. All I’m interested in this time is what the essay reveals about the reform movement.

Minding the Campus is brought to you by the Manhattan Institute. Where there’s an Institute, there’s an agenda, or better yet, many agendas, each with a Center devoted to it. The Center for the American University, for instance, which seeks to promote “diversity of thought” (aka “intellectual pluralism”) in higher education. One prong of their effort is the Veritas Fund, which is supposed to bolster “Western Civ” in university curricula. Minding the Campus is another prong, intended to “foster a new climate of opinion that favors civil and honest engagement of all sides, offering an engaged debate for readers concerned with the state of the modern university.” Or so they say. My assumption is that high-minded statements of purpose like that one are more or less disingenuous until proven otherwise. In this case the assumption is borne out by the content, which isn’t to say that the whole thing is a sham—on the scale of partisan web sites, it’s got some pretty respectable stuff. But there’s a paragraph of Johnson’s essay that gives a truer picture of the site’s premises and priorities.

I’m a Democrat who donated to Obama’s campaign in both the primary and general election. But only the most closed-minded ideologue would deny that conservatives have dominated the recent battle of ideas in higher education. No politician can publicly defend the current situation of professors operating in a groupthink atmosphere, to the detriment of the students they teach. While liberals have mostly ignored the problem, conservatives have helped expose the alarming decline in intellectual pluralism on today’s college campuses. They’ve also fought to uphold free speech on campus, advocated restoring merit and quality as the basic instruments for academic evaluation, and challenged the idea that diversity should form the preeminent goal in university personnel or admissions processes.

The sentence I highlighted stands out for its parochial bluster and for the battle metaphor, which I can’t help but read ironically. I guess we’re supposed to conclude that conservatives are winning the battle because they have better ideas, or maybe because they’re more persuasive. In a commentary from a few years ago arguing against “intellectual diversity,” Stanley Fish uses the same metaphor, but he identifies the war, as well (his mystification about a conventional horticultural metaphor is odd, though). Deciding “who won (or is winning) the culture wars in the academy… depends on what you mean by winning.” “The left may have won the curricular battle, but the right won the public-relations war.”

[I]f the palm is to be awarded to the party that persuaded the American public to adopt its characterization of the academy, the right wins hands down, for it is now generally believed that our colleges and universities are hotbeds (what is a “hotbed” anyway?) of radicalism and pedagogical irresponsibility where dollars are wasted, nonsense is propagated, students are indoctrinated, religion is disrespected, and patriotism is scorned.

Of the points on Johnson’s list of winning ideas, the one about free speech is the strongest. From what I’ve seen, the conservative challenge to speech codes has been reasonably principled, able to differentiate between the authoritarian manifestations of the Left’s ideology and the ideology itself. It takes an oversimplifying spin to make some of the other ideas sound like winners. Contrary to the implications, “merit and quality” are still “basic instruments for academic evaluation,” and diversity is not “the preeminent goal in university personnel or admissions processes.” To the extent that diversity is factored into those decisions, it complicates the process and arguably compromises the purely academic and intellectual standards that should drive it. It’s not an all-or-nothing tradeoff, and there shouldn’t be any need to short-circuit the argument by pretending it is if the case against diversity initiatives is so strong.

Neither “conservatives” nor “liberals” are of one mind about these issues (and I hope everyone is keeping in mind that an analysis reduced to these two broad categories is pretty crude). The conservative side is of two minds about one of them, in particular. They have generally challenged diversity initiatives, but not the one that’s designed to benefit conservatives—“intellectual diversity”—which some of them are busy promoting (“intellectual diversity” and “intellectual pluralism” are interchangeable terms, as far as I can tell). Maybe Fish is wrong and this is a kind of diversity that’s uniquely appropriate to the academy. But for David Horowitz, the lead promoter, it’s a matter of “[using] the language that the left has deployed so effectively in behalf of its own agendas.” To the extent he’s co-opting the idea as well as the language, then it’s a liberal idea that’s winning. If he’s just lifting the language to sell a fundamentally different idea, then he’s working in public relations.

I’ve collected plenty of reservations and gripes as a teacher, about all the priorities of institutions of higher education that have little to do with education, for instance, and about the lightweight and diffuse feeling of a lot of the curriculum. I can only imagine one of the four courses I’ve taught at Duke being offered at Reed College, back in my day (I like to think things there haven’t changed that much). The rest of my courses have been a little too fluffy. It’d be nice to have the opportunity to teach a more rigorous class now and then, but the fluffy classes have had their own charms, so I can’t complain. Naturally I’ve been aware for a long time of the conservative rhetoric about liberal bias in academia. Mostly I’ve dismissed it as a lot of noise. Not that I doubted that I was surrounded by liberals and those to their left—that’s obvious—but it wasn’t until the lacrosse case came along that I saw any reason to worry about it. The conservative reformists got my attention as a group that could potentially hold the campus orthodoxy that I’d been complacent about to a higher standard, and at the same time as a group with a completely uncritical attitude towards an intellectually disgraceful analysis that flattered their worldview.

My trail into and around this battle of ideas is recorded here in my blog. The lacrosse case led me to Durham-in-Wonderland (DIW), which led me to FIRE and then to Alan Kors and the “sadness of higher education.” Where Kors was sad, Edward Glick was just whiny. A month or so ago I wrote about the Veritas fund’s foothold at Cornell and also summed up my impressions of “intellectual diversity.” I’ve read lots of other stuff here and there, but it still adds up to an idiosyncratic sample that doesn’t come close to covering all the angles. I think I’ve gotten a pretty good sense of how the battle is typically being fought, though.

Once upon a comment thread, Michael Bérubé suggested a shorthand for the routine critique of liberal bias—“Larry Summers and Duke lacrosse team Ward Churchill.” For conservatives, those three scandals are the sickness at the heart of academia made concrete. Concentrating on the extremists who are assumed to be commonplace in this Wonderland makes for easy and formulaic criticism. It’s fine for everyday grumbling but it seems like professors trying to make a serious point would aim higher. It was an odd experience when my post on Alan Kors was cast as the “contemptuous dismissal” of the “academic establishment,” if not the ranting of a “hard core, uninformed crank[]”—whatever its flaws, what I wrote is careful, detailed, and deeply ambivalent. The extremist fixation is death to perspective, which suits the anti-intellectual set just fine—perspective tends to drain outrage, which is a great source of energy and invective for them. It’s also how you tell the difference between mountains and molehills and all the things in between, and it’s a hallmark of meaningful, intelligent criticism.

If “Duke Lacrosse hoax” and “Ward Churchill” and “Bill Ayers” stand for pretense, prejudice, and witless groupthink, a critic disgusted with the situation ought to stand for something else. Writing broad-minded, well-reasoned, and undogmatic criticism would be a great way to do that, but conservatives assume, with some justification, that they’re in the minority and embattled, and apparently it’s a situation that calls for something more forceful. At times it seems like there’s a balancing reaction at work that’s almost Newtonian—bias answered by an equal and opposite counter-bias. Other times the assumption at work seems to be that careful consideration of the ideas of a commonplace campus radical would inevitably give them too much credit and insult the intelligence of decent, sensible readers. Staking a rhetorical claim to the intellectual high ground, to open-minded, rational examination of hard facts, for example, is a lot more motivating than an actual rational examination of hard facts, especially one that attempts to put the outrageous evidence in perspective. Alan Kors is generally more careful and thoughtful than other conservative critics I’ve read, but when he gets down to partisan business he treats the other side as an intellectual non-entity, and the result is melodramatic and uninsightful criticism. The less thoughtful writers come across as lightweights and demagogues. This is a problem for a community dedicated to the proposition that a healthy academy needs more people like themselves—the cure looks a lot like the disease, if not worse.

Intellectual diversity is overtly a matter of balance—one excess balancing out another, according to the Manhattan Institute’s David DeRosiers: “[t]he idea behind what we’re doing is to bring back triumphalism to moderate the excesses of gender and [diversity courses].” He was quoted in the context of the Institute’s debut at Cornell, but I think the comment applies more generally. It’s much more representative of the thinking behind Minding the Campus than the inspiring epigraph from Allan Bloom on their “About Us” page.

The liberally educated person is one who is able to resist the easy and preferred answers, not because he is obstinate but because he knows others worthy of consideration.

That would look great chiseled in marble, wouldn’t it? It’s pure PR, though—I don’t see any signs on the site of special resistance to easy and preferred answers, or, for that matter, much evidence of minds deeply touched by “intellectual pluralism and the best traditions of liberal education.” The project, really, is to promulgate the r/Right set of easy and preferred answers, perhaps in order to strike a balance with the other side’s easy and preferred answers. If that’s what they have in mind, though, relativism must be another liberal idea that’s winning.

It’s a matter of faith in most of these conservative critiques that once upon a time, things were better, so reform is really a matter of revival. More on that in the next post.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CODA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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