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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s the tale. It’s late October 2006. The indicted lacrosse players have recently been on 60 Minutes, and the election that will decide if Nifong will continue as DA is a couple of weeks away. Duke Chemistry professor Steven Baldwin writes an editorial in the Duke Chronicle calling the administration and a portion of the faculty to account for their abysmal record during the scandal. He’s defiant and forthright in the face of the rush-to-judgment crowd’s choke-hold on campus, declaring that some of his colleagues “should be tarred and feathered, ridden out of town on a rail and removed from the academy.” He was simply insisting that professors do their duty and treat their students decently, but

[his] missive did arouse the wrath of the righteous. Ignoring any pretense of desiring dialogue and debate with those who dared to challenge their agenda, the Group [of 88] and its sympathizers immediately tried to silence Baldwin. “Clarifying” faculty Robyn Wiegman wrote a letter to the Chronicle bizarrely suggesting that Baldwin’s op-ed used the “language of lynching,” only to receive a history lesson from Johnsville News. Baldwin, undeterred, continued speaking up for all Duke students throughout the spring.

Weigman and others “proceeded to torment the professor who showed the moral courage” to demand accountability from his colleagues. One colleague even emailed Baldwin with “an implicit call for violence.” And the torment had its “unbearably sad” effect.

Professor Baldwin, having used a perfectly apt metaphor for how the unapologetic faculty members should be treated, then saw fit to kneel down at the altar of political correctness and issue the ritual apology.

That’s the operatic version of reality you’ll get from KC Johnson and Harvey Silverglate, co-founder of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. Silverglate, in particular, can really lay it on with a trowel. Here, though, is the email from political science professor Kerry Haynie that, as Johnson and/or Baldwin see it, includes an “implicit call for violence.”

Dear Steven,

I read with amusement your opinion column in today’s Chronicle. Frankly, I found it to be insulting and out of the normal bounds of both civil and academic discourse. I hope the students that you say you love so much don’t take this lesson in hypocrisy from you. They deserve a better model than this. On the one hand you criticize some unnamed faculty for characterizing students in a pejorative manner, and then you speak of tarring and feathering and running folk out of town on a rail. You ask the faculty to speak their minds and to do what they think is right, but what you seem to really want is for us to do these things only if and when we agree with you. It is this attitude that has no place in the academy, where the free expression of ideas, thoughts and beliefs should be cherished and protected. And you even had the nerve to include a thinly veiled threat of legal action in response to some alleged slander. Steven, it is you who should be ashamed.

Are you the one with the tar and feathers? I can be found at the address below and I am usually on campus everyday. And you should know that if I ever leave Duke it will be on my terms and not because you or anybody else wants to see me go on a rail.

So, is there even a hint of political correctness in Haynie’s note? No. Does Haynie accuse Baldwin of being a racist? No. Does he slap Baldwin with a how-dare-you for defending the villainous lacrosse players? No. Does he tell Baldwin to just shut up, or threaten to sick the authorities on him and get him fired? Sure doesn’t. Does Haynie make any kind of threat at all? Nope. He does raise a rhetorical question about whether Baldwin means to get real about his wild and crazy language. It’s not a suggestion to step outside and settle things man to man. But Johnson seems to agree with Silverglate that no reasonable person could object to Baldwin’s “perfectly apt metaphor,” and there wasn’t much chance that he could get a clear impression of Haynie’s email through that thick a cloud.

Absolutely nothing about the message supports the Johnson-Silverglate myth, and it was already a stretch when it rested on Weigman’s public letter alone. How did that letter, or anything else Weigman could have done, force Baldwin to “kneel down at the altar of political correctness”?

The episode is a pretty good microcosm of the shouting match that was kicked up by the lacrosse team’s miserable party, and through it you can get the truth about KC Johnson in a nutshell—he’s done whatever it takes to turn the people at Duke he’s written about into pawns of a threadbare culture-war mythology.

How lazy can you get in the face of your own ideological fairy tales? When Johnson is criticized he’s plenty prickly about evidence, but his own interest in uncovering evidence, or even in seeing what’s already in plain sight, is about as narrowly agenda-driven as it could possibly be. There are no signs that Johnson (or, for that matter, Silverglate or the reporter for FIRE) did a speck of actual research on this episode before pontificating on its significance. Johnson must have been in contact with Baldwin, either to get Haynie’s email or Baldwin’s impression of it (and you have to wonder if Johnson even read the message before making his claim). How many other emails and calls did Baldwin get? Who were they from? In what way were they attempts to silence him? Without any of that information, Johnson is just making up stories.

Johnson’s selective attention to evidence is just as clear in his attacks on Mark Anthony Neal. His interest in anything Neal has written or said, like his interest in the responses to Baldwin’s editorial, dried up after he collected a couple of usefully incriminating items (his ears perk up late in the game when something new comes up that he can ridicule). But sometimes being selective isn’t enough. What he does to Haynie is the most blatant and slanderous misrepresentation I’ve come across. Unlike others I’ve found, it’s based on source material that wasn’t public when the claim was made, and it’s hard to imagine that’s a coincidence. But he’s not much more subtle in misrepresenting nearly every aspect of Karla Holloway’s published article about the case. He misrepresents Lubiano’s comments about “perfect offenders,” as well, and then calls her insistent corrections “revisionism”—another misrepresentation. And he passes on as fact Richard Bertrand Spencer’s fantasy that Neal has said he hears a racial slur whenever he walks into a new class at Duke—kind of a stretch, since Spencer’s claim is based on an article published more than a year before Neal started teaching there.

Johnson is all too ready to excuse himself and his readers from facing inconvenient challenges. When I emailed to ask for confirmation or comment on Haynie’s account of the exchange with Baldwin, Johnson answered that he doesn’t respond to items posted on anonymous blogs, and besides that Haynie once answered Johnson’s email with a rude and dismissive one-liner (“Get a freaking life! Quote me.”). I’d grant Johnson his objection to anonymous criticism, except that the page in question is signed by Haynie—it’s easy enough to do what I did and contact him for confirmation. And I suppose that Haynie’s angry email might be a sign that he’s so unreasonable and aggressive that it’s best to just ignore him, but I doubt it. In practice Haynie’s line turns out to be a useful addition to the collection of incriminating quotes, including Holloway’s motto and Neal’s epithet, that Johnson uses to pigeonhole and dismiss his opponents. Once he has it in the bag he trots it out, by my count, four of the five times he mentions Haynie in DIW. One of those posts is a vindictive little exposé about the books Haynie lists as “forthcoming,” an example of another standard practice on DIW—gratuitous character prosecution.

[I emailed Johnson again after this post went up and he sent back the same excuses, then followed up with a longer evasion that I’ve posted as a comment. Haynie’s page is not anonymous and neither is this one. The site Haynie’s page is on shouldn’t be anonymous, either—more on that below.]

It’s odd because Haynie was part of one of the only groups of Duke faculty that Johnson consistently credits with being sensible and honorable—the committee chaired by James Coleman that looked into lacrosse team behavior. Even though Haynie contributed to a report that was widely seen as both fair and favorable to the team and though he made no public comments I can find about team members, it seems that he felt not only angry but potentially singled out by Baldwin’s jab at “faculty who publicly savaged the character and reputations of specific men’s lacrosse players.” What that tells me is that Johnson’s simplistic version of events is far from the whole story. But Haynie’s apparent integrity in one context is small potatoes compared to the power of the myth, and in Wonderland black professors who react angrily to Baldwin’s or Johnson’s righteousness are practically by definition dangerous drones of identity politics. Given that Johnson managed to dismiss the criticism directed at him by a man he practically enshrined as the conscience of Duke—James Coleman—writing Haynie off must have been child’s play.

The root of Johnson’s analysis-in-Wonderland is the myth of a cohesive mob of irrational ideologues whose reaction to the lacrosse team and most anything else can be explained by their race/class/gender mindset. As far as he’s concerned a hint is the same as a smoking gun with these sort of people, and he seems to be convinced he knows them well. There was a time, months ago, when I thought that at least some of Johnson’s criticism of Duke faculty had value as an abrasive antidote to the more dogmatic reflexes of the academic left. But whenever I scratch the surface all I find is intellectually vacuous attacks—little more than faith-based efforts to reduce his opponents to type. Sometimes, like when he harps on Neal’s supposed “intellectual thuggery,” it’s amazing how hypocritically lost Johnson gets in his little agenda. It’s him, not Neal, who’s inclined to do violence with and to words, and to set up those he chooses to attack as targets for the self-righteous and the ignorant.

Johnson doesn’t use the language of bigots, but in the cases I’ve studied his criticism is based on the airtight reasoning of bigotry. Responding to Charles Piot’s claim that his attacks on black women have been especially virulent, Johnson claims to be color- and gender-blind.

The blog criticized black female professors (Wahneema Lubiano, Karla Holloway). It criticized white male professors (Bill Chafe, Peter Wood, Alex Rosenberg). It criticized white female professors (Anne Allison, Cathy Davidson, Diane Nelson). It criticized black male professors (Mark Anthony Neal, Houston Baker, Maurice Wallace). It criticized Hispanic professors (Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Antonio Viego). It criticized mixed-race professors (Grant Farred). The common element in the critique was the professor’s position on issues relating to the lacrosse case and the race/class/gender trinity upon which the Group’s approach was based.

It’s true that he hammers away at all those professors with criticism that’s uniformly harsh. But his attacks on Lubiano and Holloway are especially intense and sustained—they stand apart as determined efforts to portray dangerous, muddle-headed ideologues who offer nothing of value. It’s hard to find any meaningful difference between his take on Holloway and the reflexive opinions of a misogynist. He accentuates the supposedly violent side of two black men, Haynie and Neal. The only justification he gives for cultivating the impression of Neal as a dangerous black man is that the quotes he uses to do so are fair game. There’s virtually no insight in any of these portraits, but there’s a great deal of incitement—implications and insinuations that cater to his readers’ anger and prejudice. All signs are that Johnson is completely unreflective when it comes to his own presumptions and biases, so it’s my guess that he’s treating gender and race as pieces of evidence that, when combined with a pernicious left-wing mindset, imply an extra dose of both bias and threat (a while back Tenured Radical wrote eloquently about being on the receiving end of this kind of thinking).

The Truth about KC Johnson is also the title of the website with Haynie’s account of his email to Baldwin. The site popped up sometime last December as an effort to counteract the picture Johnson has painted of the case. The main page is an unsigned essay that’s highly critical of Johnson. Three of the other five pages are material that isn’t available elsewhere—besides Haynie’s page, there’s Lubiano’s point-by-point response to her portrayal in Until Proven Innocent and a collection of hateful email that various Duke professors have received. Early on the summary essay veers towards a cynical stance that can, I think, be counterproductive, but as a whole it points out many of DIW’s flaws both efficiently and cogently. Along with the supporting material posted on the site there are links to other blogs that have been critical of Johnson, including mine. If it’s authentic, everything posted on the site besides the summary came from a tenured professor at Duke (and I see no reason to doubt the authenticity of anything there), so I don’t understand why the site as a whole isn’t signed by an individual or group. Anonymity is sometimes justified when it allows vulnerable people to express themselves, but I don’t see how these particular circumstances qualify. If they do, I’d be interested in having that explained.