I was in Seattle for Reagan’s re-election, and had moved to Chicago a few months before the 1988 race that gave us our first four Bush years. For most of the time in between I was studying music at CalArts, the avant-guarde school that Disney built at the northern edge of LA’s sprawl, where it was slowly surrounded by the clean-cut and conservative cul-de-sacs of Valencia. The land of fruits and nuts, as a friend of mine used to say. It was a Reagan-era kind of place.

Chicago—Hyde Park, in fact—was a huge change. There’s no getting away from politics in Chicago. It’d been a year since Harold Washington’s sudden death, but the city was still battling through the aftermath. I was still there four years later, and that time I finally got to vote for the winner. What I remember most clearly from ‘92 isn’t Clinton, it’s Carol Mosley Braun’s run for the senate. People I knew in the neighborhood were involved in her campaign, I think. We were all thrilled that she won—too bad things didn’t go as well once she got to Washington. I guess by that time, Barack Obama was circulating in the neighborhood and teaching at the U of C, not that I had a clue.

I was in Boston for Clinton’s re-election, and down here in North Carolina for the Bush v. Gore debacle. God was that depressing! And in many ways the 2004 election was even worse. How could such a bungling idiot get re-elected? Canada never looked better, but I consoled myself that if Kerry had won, it’s likely he’d have been a weak president who’d have to absorb Bush’s catastrophic mistakes and would likely absorb a lot of the blame as well. Better, maybe, for Bush to keep stewing in it, and it seemed pretty clear that he’d thoroughly discredit himself if he had four more years. He did just that. Too bad all the rest of us are stuck in the hole, too.

After Bush won in 2000 I felt like I understood what the people who loathed the Clintons had gone through for 8 years. Just the sound of that Texas drawl on the radio and I can’t turn the thing off fast enough. It’s a gut reaction, and I’m sure Bill Clinton’s voice can do the same thing to a lot of Republicans. And for many people I know, and to some extent for me, too, there was an apocalyptic feel to the Reagan victory, and even more to Bush II. It was a show of political force from hordes of people who apparently wanted to bulldoze life as we knew it, and it wasn’t clear what was going to stop them. Fortunately the complicated business of running a country slows down even anti-government administrations.

Anyway, I have some sympathy for the people who are feeling alienated and anxious in the face of all this whooping and hollering and talk of change. When you’re stuck on a ship, it’s not a good feeling when someone you don’t like or trust takes over the wheel. It’ll be tough having to listen to President Obama holding forth from the bully pulpit, and having to listen to all the ridiculous and obnoxious stuff his supporters and fans will come up with. One consolation, if you voted for Bush, is that your guy is leaving a huge mess, and it’s hard to see how Obama will have the time or money to enslave the white race, or whatever. So no need to let your imagination run away with you. If it’s already run away, and you’re convinced that Obama is Muslim, that he wasn’t born in the US, that he didn’t write his own book, that he’s a Marxist, that you better stock up on American flags because pretty soon you won’t be able to buy one, etc., etc., here’s what I’d suggest:

Grow up, folks! Get a grip! There’s lots of real problems—go find one!

In the mean time, I’ll be enjoying myself. It was nice to be able to vote for the winner back in ‘92 and ‘96, but this time it’s a whole lot sweeter. Even though I had a feeling from the beginning that Obama would pull this off, it’s still hard to believe it actually happened. An articulate president who’s seen the world from many angles, from the ground up, and reacts with curiosity and intelligence? A president who’s as gifted a politician as Bill Clinton and has self-control to boot? A president who’s broken through the most symbolic of racial barriers with the grace and confidence of a man who has nothing to prove about how black he is or about how black he isn’t? A president who projects the best qualities of the two countries that have shaped my life, America and Kenya?

It’s too much.

Here’s a timely message from Sam, the American Eagle. (hat tip)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

DIW has its virtues. Johnson has a remarkable ability to synthesize information coming in from all sides and quickly turn it into cogent text. And what he writes about is well documented and well linked, so the blog is a tremendous resource for anyone interested in tracking down a document, an event, or a quote from this or that phase of the scandal. Gathering and organizing all the detail and technicality of a legal proceeding is something he seems well suited for, and as far as I can tell his coverage of Nifong and the judicial and law enforcement aspects of the case is thorough and accurate. He’s thanked personally in the statements Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty made when they were exonerated—something he can justly be proud of.

Roughly half of the blog [correction: roughly a quarter] is devoted to the way the case played out at Duke, and there is, in my opinion, much less to be proud of on that side. Under his blog title, Johnson promises “comments and analysis about the Duke/Nifong case.” No matter what aspect of the case he’s writing about, though, he approaches it more as a prosecutor than an analyst (at times inquisitor is probably more apt). An analyst explains and explores and maybe even illuminates, if you’re lucky. Prosecution is by comparison much more focussed, selective, and agenda-driven. While the job of a criminal prosecutor is to build a case against the defendant(s), as I understand it his ultimate goal is not supposed to be conviction but the correct verdict. The big villain of the lacrosse case was a prosecutor who cared about nothing but the conviction. Johnson has prosecuted the so-called “Group of 88” Duke faculty in the court of public opinion with a similarly narrow and self-serving commitment to doing what it takes to get that guilty verdict, and he’s proven to be much better at it than Nifong. Given all the scorn he heaped on the now-disgraced criminal prosecutor, with good reason—for ignoring exculpatory evidence, manipulating public opinion and various other shoddy maneuvers—you’d think Johnson would be more principled in taking on his own chosen wrongdoers. If he is, it’s not by much.

That’s not to say that there’s any ethical equivalence—Nifong betrayed the trust he held as a public servant, and if he had been successful the consequences would have been catastrophic for the people effected. Even his failed prosecution turned lives upside down. The worst Johnson can do to any individual is trivial by comparison, but he still has enough influence on opinion and discussion of the case to do widespread damage. The charge leveled at him most often is that his attacks and misrepresentations have fueled virulent, hateful communications of the kind Provost Peter Lange lamented in his January email to the Duke faculty (Lange himself refers to blogs generically as one source of the attacks that trouble him but doesn’t single out DIW or any others by name). I have very little inside information about the personal costs of these attacks and don’t want to imaginatively overstate them—however bad things were when the controversy was most heated, I think it’s safe to say that most of the faculty who came under attack will be able to shrug it off, if they haven’t already. I doubt that it’s so easy for those who’ve gotten the most virulent and threatening messages, though. Three that are particularly vile are included in Duke Professor Charles Piot’s recent critique of DIW. Regarding the effects of such attacks I don’t have anything to add to what Lange and Piot have to say, best considered along with Johnson’s rebuttal of Piot and his response to “The Group of 88’s E-Mail Canard” of Lange and others. Later I’ll have plenty to say about the relationship of DIW to the more strident and bigoted rhetoric about the case.

In early October, Duke professors James Coleman and Prasad Kasibhatla sent a letter to the Duke Chronicle in order to correct what they felt was a broad misconception left by the lacrosse controversy about the relationship of Duke faculty to their students. Coleman, who teaches law, is widely admired both for his early, pointed criticism of Nifong and for the clarity and evenhandedness of the report on lacrosse team behavior issued by a committee he chaired. In a “Cast of Characters” post, Johnson justly puts him first of the list of heros. Coleman and Kasibhatla single out Johnson (along with Stuart Taylor, coauthor with Johnson of the book Until Proven Innocent) for contributing to “the continued drumbeat of destructive criticism” that’s spread the notion that

the faculty at Duke and at other universities are increasingly a bunch of ideologues who care less about the their students and more about promoting their own extremist agendas. Nothing could be further from the truth. Faculty at Duke… care deeply about students and are passionately committed to their personal and intellectual growth. Anyone who has the slightest knowledge of the daily life of a faculty member will quickly appreciate the time, effort and energy that faculty put into teaching, advising and mentoring students. To suggest otherwise, on the basis of isolated and selective incidents that occur over the course of complex events and are taken out of context, is nothing more than a tragic rush to judgment.

A glance through the signatures on the internet petition circulated by Friends of Duke University gives a pretty good idea of the problem. The petition was originally a statement by the Duke Economics Department, and in one of its two clauses they affirmed that they welcome to their classes and other activities all students, including members of the lacrosse team. Posted as a petition for the public at large, signatures by non-faculty (the vast bulk of the 900 or so) are, in effect, admonishment to Duke faculty to be tolerant, and many who signed—I hope the majority—did so in the spirit of affirming broad tolerance and urging the administration to be more vocal in supporting the indicted students. But the signature pages are peppered with hectoring, intolerant jabs at the 88. What Coleman and Kasibhatla make plain is how shallow these judgments are, and how disconnected they are from the day-to-day reality of the university as they see it. It’s by no means debilitating harm, but still a shame that a professor, of all people, would foster such a narrow-minded judgment of a university.

I got a taste of Johnson’s prosecutorial tendencies in our email exchange, in which he kept wondering when I’d produce my “evidence.” I fully understand his insistence that I back up my harsh characterization of DIW, and it may have been poor judgment on my part to lay my bottom-line opinion out so baldly when I knew it would be days before I’d be prepared to explain it in detail (and as usual it’s been many more days than I expected). But “anti-academic,” “irrational,” and “insidiously divisive” are clearly matters of (more or less well-informed) opinion, so I found it odd and a little ridiculous that he kept wondering what evidence I thought I had unearthed about the “Group.” I’m sure he had every confidence that there could be no such thing.

Something that comes out both in Johnson’s email and the response to me he posted on DIW is his conviction that if I was attacking him I must be defending the “Group.” I’m certainly not defending the “Group of 88,” for reasons I’ll explain in a bit, and I’m in no position to defend any individual’s statements or actions with reference to case. I don’t doubt that some Duke faculty, including some who signed the “listening” statement, prejudged the guilt of the lacrosse players and acted rashly and irresponsibly on that basis. Like the potbangers, a fair number of people around campus let their outrage and moral certainty get the better of them. People who cared about broad issues of social and racial justice should have been more concerned and vocal about due process and fair play in the investigation and prosecution of the rape allegation. I think Duke as an institution has everything to gain from looking all those problems squarely in the eye, though when I say that I’m thinking of a broad-minded and inclusive oral and documentary history and not the inquisitional “full public accounting of the faculty’s conduct in spring 2006” that Johnson mentioned in one of his last emails to me. If there was ever anything to gain from dwelling obsessively on the most outrageous and indefensible aspects of the “rush to judgment,” that time is long past. And if the behavior of a faction of Duke’s faculty was so abominable, it didn’t require Johnson’s heavy-handed, narrow-minded, scornful, divisive polemic to bring it to light.

Writing to welcome new readers to the blog after the publication of his book, Johnson describes the event at Duke that galvanized his interest.

I first turned my attention to the Duke case after an April 2006 ad signed by 88 members of the Duke arts and sciences faculty. The ad stated unequivocally that something “happened” to Crystal Mangum; and said “thank you” to protesters who, among other things, had carried “CASTRATE” banners and blanketed the campus with “wanted” posters of the lacrosse team. The professors’ decision to sign the ad betrayed the ideals of their—and my—profession.

Johnson’s writing his own blog, so he’s entitled to go after the folks who offend him in whatever way he wants. On the other hand, not only is he deriving credibility as a critic of academics and academic culture from the fact that he’s a professor, he’s positioning himself as a defender of academic ideals. I think it’s fair, then, to expect him to analyze or criticize or, if he must, prosecute in a way that’s consistent with those ideals, and in my opinion he doesn’t come close to meeting that standard.

His worst failure—one I consider positively anti-academic—is that he is a friend to ignorance, often in subtle ways but sometimes they’re not so subtle. He’s willing to pass judgment without drawing clear lines between what he knows for sure, what’s probable, and what’s unknown, and he avoids shining a light into the grey areas if they make for useful innuendo. He offers little resistance to readers inclined to render superficial and harsh judgment of the figures he attacks—regularly boiling his attacks down to a dismissive or derisive phrase that’s repeated as a tag line or epithet, for instance. Another thing that flies in the face of academic or journalistic standards is that he often makes no attempt to interpret and convey the main point and purpose of the texts he criticizes, approaching them instead like a prosecutor digging for evidence, free to pull out a passage or just a phrase and give it a literalistic, context-free reading if that furthers his case. Combine that with the habit of dwelling with self-righteous and unwavering certainty on an interpretation of the evidence that puts his opponents in the worst possible light, and there’s little chance of constructive debate—another core academic value.

For me the foundation of the scholarly enterprise, and what I most value in a student, is free-ranging curiosity. A prime academic virtue that gives curiosity some space to do its work is the placement of understanding before judgment (it’s something I’ve thought about when I’ve taught music classes like Intro to Jazz because they’re a great opportunity to give students some practice at suspending judgment). Whether it’s a scholarly ideal or the pie-in-the-sky idealism of a marginal academic, I don’t know—the success of Johnson’s “Group of 88” campaign suggests the latter. But on a personal level I find it disturbing that DIW—a sprawling text that purports to analyze an intricate human drama—is relentlessly and schematically judgmental. With the interest in people and things almost entirely channeled into prosecuting rather than understanding, Duke-in-Wonderland—the version of reality in which Johnson has an open-and-shut case—is a dismal and intellectually impoverished place.

The second sentence of the welcome message quoted above (“The ad stated unequivocally…”) puts in a nutshell Johnson’s principal complaints about the “listening” statement (an earlier post has a few more links to articles about this statement, which was published as an ad in the Duke Chronicle). I’ll call it the standard indictment formula, because variations of it crop up dozens of times in DIW. Its two clauses highlight the most objectionable lines in the “listening” statement. Johnson raised the issue for the first time in his April 23, 2006 post titled “The Group of 88,” which points out that

[t]he statement spoke of “what happened to this young woman” (which at that point consisted of nothing more than uncorroborated allegations) and gave a message to campus protesters: “Thank you for not waiting” until the police completed their investigation. Activities of these campus protesters, as we now all know, included such items as the “wanted” poster and branding the team “rapists.”

I can accept this first blast, before the charges have been reduced to a formula for incrimination, as justified indignation—the parts of the ad that he singles out bother me, too. And I don’t discount the bitter frustration behind his refrain, in subsequent entries, that nobody on the faculty or administration at Duke is calling Nifong to account or speaking up for the students under investigation. But right out of the gate, Johnson is making sweeping claims that say much more about his sensitivities and prejudices than about the ad. In the very next paragraph he has the ad’s endorsers thinking in unison about holding the lacrosse players broadly responsible for prejudice and oppression and even wanting them prosecuted solely on that basis:

In today’s Newsweek, a student at predominantly African-American North Carolina Central carried the Duke 88’s thinking to its logical, if absurd, extreme. The student said that he wanted to see the Duke students prosecuted “whether it happened or not. It would be justice for things that happened in the past.”

The apparent confidence that he can read 88 minds at once reflects his certainty that the text of the ad coming from the people who endorsed it can only mean one thing—a cornerstone of the “Group of 88” crusade and an article of faith that Johnson has never questioned or analyzed in any serious way. The two lines in the ad that really matter are the two that strike a nerve and serve as the basis for the standard indictment. The other thing that registers is that the ad talks about perceived incidents of racism or sexism, which to Johnson translates into a charge that racism and sexism is rampant at Duke. His willingness to let a text be defined by a selective and sensitized reading of it is entirely characteristic.

Here is my best effort to summarize Johnson’s principles of Groupthink—the assumptions and habits that have allowed him to create a monster called the “Group of 88” out of the 88 people who chose for one reason or another, and with no thought of forming an ongoing collective, to endorse a text that was emailed to them (as a gesture of resistance to the idea of a “Group of 88”—and I’m know it’s futile—I’ve chosen to refer to those who signed the ad as “endorsers,” which is less of a mouthful than “signatories”):

1. Johnson knows what message the 88 endorsers sent when they signed the ad. Any claim by an endorser to have read the ad differently or intended a different message is either disingenuous or delusional. In particular, there is no denying that the ad signals a firm belief that a rape occurred at the lacrosse team party. So, for example, Johnson has no trouble dismissing out of hand Alice Kaplan’s claim that “the statement was about the climate on campus…. There’s nothing in the statement that says anyone is guilty or innocent.” What she said, and should retract and apologize for, is what Johnson says she said, not what she thinks she said (here’s another post along the same lines).
2. The ad-hoc collection of 88 people who endorsed the ad is a cohesive, capitol-G “Group.” The absolutist interpretation of the ad is one basis for this myth of unity, I think—they all signed the same statement, so they all said the same thing, so they all must think the same. There’s also the hypnotic power of language to create the impression of substance. The “Group of 88” is the title of first post about the “listening” statement—a convenient way to refer to the collection of people he’d just become aware of. A facile and uncritical writer, Johnson settles comfortably into the habit of calling people who endorsed the ad “members of the Group of 88,” as if the “Group” was an organization with members like the Academic Council or the YMCA. Naturally, the “listening” statement becomes the “Group of 88 statement.” From the perspective of a prosecutor a useful feature of the “Group” is that, no matter how much like an organization he treats it, it has no spokesperson and so will never answer back.
3. The “Group of 88” is a meaningful reference point for any discussion of Duke faculty or campus culture. In fact, it’s practically mandatory. When Johnson writes about ad endorsers they’re always tagged as “Group members,” several times if possible. “Group sympathizers” and “Clarifiers” (those who didn’t endorse the “listening” statement but signed the “concerned faculty” statement in January) are also habitually tagged. Put a few endorsers together in a room, with or without others, and you have a “Group of 88” event. A post about a few endorsers is, more often than not, a “Group of 88” post (“The Group of 88’s Latest Defense,” “The Group of 88’s Imagined Reality”, “The Group of 88 Rehab Tour”, which I somehow joined in “The Group of 88 Rehab Tour Continues”). In fact the phrase “Group of 88” or some variation is sprinkled so liberally and gratuitously throughout the text of DIW that it is made to seem relevant to just about everything.
4. With an occasional exception, “Group members” are only newsworthy when they do or say something that serves the prosecution—the only reason to mention any of them is to attack, criticize, disparage, or dismiss them. This means that, on DIW, they are almost entirely defined by the statements and actions Johnson feels are prejudicial or hostile to the lacrosse team, that show them to be unreasonable, thoughtless, or conspiratorial, or that in some other way put them in a bad light. My guess is that’s what Coleman and Kasibhatla had in mind when they complained that Johnson and Taylor portrayed faculty members “on the basis of isolated and selective incidents that occur over the course of complex events and are taken out of context.” In his series of “Group profiles”—entries in which he describes the scholarship of select endorsers—the only ones he profiled who had not already been roundly condemned for other reasons were those he could portray as radically left-wing, overly PC, engaged in marginal scholarship, or in some other way ideologically suspect. There is a short post about his selective profiling followed by a long discussion of it on the blog Acephalous. More than half of those who endorsed the “listening” statement have done nothing else that warranted a mention on DIW, and the bulk of “Group of 88” criticism is directed at less than a quarter of the group.
5. Because their behavior is always placed in the context of the “Group,” most anything bad that’s said about one endorser reflects badly on all of them.

The “Group of 88” a miserable excuse for intelligent analysis, but as a rhetorical tool it’s worked brilliantly. It’s a sticky gob of condemnation and scorn, and anyone who tries to defend it is swallowing a poison pill—something I’d prefer not to do. Drawing on 15 years experience on the Duke faculty, much closer to the action than I’ve ever been, Stuart Rojstaczer sums it up this way in his review of Until Proven Innocent:

With 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). But there are nowhere near eighty-eight of them. These eighty-eight faculty members are not an organized group that thinks in lock step…. The drama created by Taylor and Johnson related to this ad and the “Group of 88” may be believable to some; but it is fiction.

The review as a whole is a well-informed, no-nonsense look at both the strengths and weaknesses of the book—I highly recommend it.

A prime example of Johnson’s willingness to use ignorance to his advantage is his treatment of the “Castrate” banner from the potbanging protest. As I wrote a couple of entries ago, the existence of the banner first registers on DIW in early January 2007, when it’s mentioned in Johnson’s dismissive response to an editorial by Cathy Davidson. A separate post on the same day—“Cathy Davidson: In Her Own Words”—uses a picture of the banner as a bludgeon by framing it with a quote from her editorial on top (she’s “adamant about the necessity for fair and impartial legal proceedings for David, Collin and Reade”) and on the bottom the line from the “listening” statement thanking protestors (the image no longer displays, but from the name of the image file—“castrate2pb3.jpg”—there’s no question what it was). The Liestoppers page makes the same insinuation graphically:

POTBANGERS NOT WAITING



“Thank You!” - Duke’s Group of 88

Throwing the “Castrate” banner at Cathy Davidson was, as far as I can tell, pure and simple opportunism. If there was any reason to single her out for the treatment, I can’t find it and Johnson doesn’t mention it. The picture was available, it was useful reinforcement to Johnson’s message that Davidson’s editorial could be written off as sheer disingenuous hypocrisy, so up it went. It seems like the revelation of such a vile threat would warrant some discussion, but careful, rational consideration would distance the banner from the people Johnson most wants to associate it with—not the potbangers but the ad endorsers. In the same vein, but even more groundless and opportunistic, is Johnson’s exploitation of the revelation months after the events that

[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.”

This insinuation hangs on the bare thread of Johnson’s choice of the word “protesters” for a few vicious, small-minded people who took it on themselves to harass Pressler and his family—taping threats to someone’s house in the middle of the night is not “collective noise.” And though Johnson doesn’t suggest that it was “protesters” who made the death threats, putting the harassment that was supposedly covered by the ad’s “thank you” in that context gives the insinuation extra bite. It’s not clear what Johnson’s basis for mentioning death threats is in the first place, since the Sports Illustrated article that Johnson cites doesn’t mention them (it’s an article that’s worth reading, by the way).

So, does Johnson believe that the endorsers were actually thanking the people who were taping signs to Pressler’s house at night? Does he believe that they knew that was happening, or that they didn’t know but would surely have approved if they did? Does he believe that all or even some of them knew about the “Castrate” banner and were approving it with the ad’s “thank you”? Or that they didn’t know about the banner but some or all of them considered the threat or even the act of castration appropriate in the circumstances? Johnson considers all of these to be irrelevant questions, as far as I can tell. Like the readers of DIW who have left comments for me, he seems to think that the only reason to raise them is to absolve the endorsers of all sin.

What I’m actually suggesting is something quite different and very simple—that Johnson ought to act like a professor. A smart man arguing a strong case doesn’t need to make wild insinuations, and I consider the insinuations about the “castrate” banner and about Pressler’s harassment both to be wild. In an environment where, for instance, “Mr. X” can write me off as “just another Klan of 88 enabler” in the TalkLeft thread about my posts, they make for fine demagoguery (there are a fair number of references to a “Klan of 88” in the comments on DIW, as well). Johnson’s insinuations are congenial to the knee-jerk fantasy that there’s a moral equivalence between the 88 people who signed the “listening” statement and the Ku Klux Klan, and to any number of other fantasies based on blanket, facile judgment of liberals, left-wing academics, “angry studies,” and the like. The only stance consistent with the academic ideals that Johnson claims to defend is to actively resist that kind of ignorance and bigotry. Thinking more like a prosecutor than an academic, he gives them free rein.

The general reaction to my focus on the “castrate” banner has been that it was just one of many outrages, that the professors who signed the ad would have or should have known about enough of them not to say “thank you,” that I’m making too much out of it. Of these, the one I take most seriously is from Nick, a recent alum who was a student in one of my classes (the link is to his second of three comments—the first is on that same post, and the last one puts the lacrosse experience in the context of his Duke experience as a whole). He grants that professors may or may not have been at the potbanging protest or known about the details, but

it is not as if the other protests were much better. Sure some talked in more abstract terms about racial and sexual issues at Duke and abroad, but most speakers just assumed or even declared the lacrosse team rapists. I was shocked that such intelligent people could react in such a way…. My problem isn’t that radical professors (and some are pretty radical) responded in this way…. My problem is that such views were accepted (or even respected) by other professors.

Based on that experience, I understand his indignation. I hope that I would have been offended too, if I had walked across campus and found people on soapboxes pretending that denouncing the lacrosse team as rapists was somehow striking a blow for justice or fighting the good fight against sexual assault, and had then heard colleagues describing it with approval. I wish some of the people who were in the thick of that, including some who signed the “listening” statement, would step up to the plate and speak candidly about the atmosphere Nick describes. At the same time I’m confident that there are students—some of the ones quoted in the “listening” statement, for instance—who had vastly different experiences, and a range that are in between. None of them make Nick’s any less valid or worthy of attention.

When I raised the issue of his insinuating treatment of the “castrate” banner in email, Johnson’s response was to allude to all of the coverage of the potbanging protest and to several other outrageous protests—his boilerplate response to the suggestion that the protestors thanked in the “listening” statement are not the ones who attacked and prejudged the lacrosse team. Criticizing my posts in DIW he imagines—and I warn anyone short on sleep or prone to migraines not to think too hard about this sentence—that I “suggested that [his] chief fault was suggesting that the Group’s ad could be interpreted as suggesting that the sole message of the potbangers’ March 26 rally was the ‘castrate’ banner.” This is wildly off the mark, but gives him a chance to repeat yet again a few of the other protest banners and slogans that have been grist for the DIW mill since it started grinding a year and a half ago. Then he wonders if I’m imagining that press coverage might have “fooled the Group” with a benign impression of the potbangers, or if I’m thinking that “Group members were so reckless that they thanked protesters… even though they had no idea what the protesters were doing or saying.” Whatever it is, it must be about the “Group”… PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN.

Next, the mechanics of misrepresentation.

Proffitt’s simplifying frame tends to reduce accuser and accused to archetypes—Rapist and Survivor. Another level of abstraction is close at hand, though, in his list of discriminations that rape survivors are leading the resistance to (“violence, homophobia, transphobia, racism, sexism, and capitalism”) and Rajendran’s sweeping claim to be calling the lacrosse team to account for “the racism and the sexism and the classism” of what they did. Rapist and Survivor become Oppressor and Oppressed. In an essay “Perfect Offenders, Perfect Victim: The Limitations of Spectacularity in the Aftermath of the Lacrosse Team Incident”, posted a month after the lacrosse party, Wahneema Lubiano, a professor in Duke’s Department of African and African American Studies, critiques the habit of “perfecting” the protagonists so that the role of oppression or prejudice in an incident is blatantly obvious and therefore “spectacular.” The inevitable resistance sets up a polarizing dynamic:

I hear desire on the part of various constituencies for the comfort either of being able to construct a perfect offender and a perfect victim, and, therefore, some kind of resolution, or the converse position—the comfort of saying that the impossibility of constructing a perfect offender and a perfect victim means that nothing happened and that nothing needs to be resolved.

Lubiano urges like-minded activists responding to the lacrosse case to get off this treadmill, since it causes “[w]hatever is routine about this incident [to be] marginalized while a desire for the incident to live up to its most horrific possibilities fights it out in public discussion with its rhetorical other….” A good description, I think, of the lacrosse-case version of a culture-war shouting match, and her description of the dynamic as a “desire… for comfort” is apt. She describes it, in sympathetic terms, as the comfort of an “understanding [that is] complete, coherent, and visible” but I’m inclined to put it in less benign terms, as the comfort of simplistic moral certainty or, in some cases, the fastidious, egocentric comfort of piling all the dirt on those people over there. And it seems that it’s more comforting to be on the side that’s constructing perfection. It was the discovery of a crime against the team committed by an eminently perfectible collection of Duke faculty that grabbed KC Johnson’s attention. With total dedication to ferreting out the “most horrific possibilities” in everything they’ve done, he’s constructed a perfectly skewed Wonderland, using the so-called “Group of 88” as a sponge to blot all the stigma off his side and spread it on the other. Among the most perfect of his many offenders is the one who “gleefully labeled the players the ‘perfect offenders’” (or so Johnson would like you to believe) in the course of telling anyone who would listen, and without a trace of glee that I can find, that such “perfecting” was a bad idea—Wahneema Lubiano. (I’ll reinforce what I said in my introduction to this series, though: I’ve never communicated with Prof. Lubiano. She’s not responsible for my opinions and interpretations and I’m not responsible for hers. If anything I say about her work bothers you, please complain to me and not to her.)

It seems to me that the controversy has revealed not so much the limitations but the dangers of spectacularity, or at least the dangers of actively “perfecting” in order to achieve it. Doing so tends to put an bloated frame around the incident, call up broad characterizations, and debase the language. In the MSNBC interview, Rajendran’s frame is “a nation… wrestling with a long legacy of institutionalized racism and a whole culture of sexual violence… with centuries of oppression,” which, she suggests, the community outrage will help to undo. That’s a hell of a lot of baggage for one incident to carry. In the show as a whole (Rita Cosby Live & Direct), Rajendran ends up as one act in a many-ring circus that includes an epic shouting match about an incident in which a man was shot 50 times by the police, another high-speed chase that ends in an explosion, and a woman who looks like a man interviewed from jail about how she supposedly kidnapped her own kids. This must be what Lubiano has in mind when she mentions “the spectacle that is news and the news as spectacle,” perhaps trying to suggest that activists should avoid feeding the beast. Then there’s Houston Baker’s temper tantrum—his open letter to the administration at Duke peppered with “privilege,” “white,” “male,” “athletic,” and “violent” in various combinations. His concern over the “horrific” incident seems to be based more on type of people involved than the nature of the acts alleged. A word like “privilege,” which should have real meaning in an incident that begins with two women’s bodies being ordered up like $400 pizzas, turns into a bludgeon (I think “entitlement” is more to the point, anyway). This kind of thing opens the door for the wholesale dismissal, on DIW and elsewhere, of virtually any criticism of the lacrosse team that invokes race or gender and to the parodies that lurk a step or two behind it—“reverse racism” and the like—which thrive on language debased by careless, reflexive “perfecting.”

To “perfect” is also to dehumanize. The way the lacrosse players were treated as clones of a generic “privileged white male” has been widely observed, and it was no credit to those who, in other contexts, would be quick to denounce the cheap generalizations of racists. But idealizing the accuser was even more integral to the thinking of the activists I’ve quoted, and it seems to have compromised their ability to think sensibly and realistically about events and issues they care about. No matter how much sincere concern was involved, the perfected accuser was little more than a comforting fabrication that made it easy to judge and to act, and do so rashly. I suppose such a thing might serve a cause or a community in some situations. But it seems more likely to undermine than to help a woman bringing rape allegations, since she will almost certainly look bad and the accused good relative to their perfected stand-ins. The effect was stark as the lacrosse case progressed, but it seems to me that in any rape case “perfecting” the accuser can only add fuel to the legal scrutiny of her character, and likely to any public scrutiny, as well—the last thing she needs.

The “listening” statement—the basis of an endlessly distracting controversy—shows in practice, I believe, what Lubiano was getting at when she advised others to “move from the specific harms associated with the incident alleged at the house on N. Buchanan Blvd. in order to look at the more difficult to ‘see,’ the less spectacularly visible harms of more generally structured and distributed sexism and racism.” The ad is built around a collection of quotes that gives a kaleidoscopic impression of the state of mind of a group of minority students in the wake of the rape allegation. The three comments about “self-segregation” and generic indignities of parties and classes, taken from an article in the Independent Weekly, most clearly convey the “generally structured and distributed” experience. Most of the other quotes show the students feeling anxious or at odds with the community or the institution in the heightened atmosphere post-allegation. Notably missing, especially in comparison to the protests and to statements like Houston Baker’s, is any direct comment about the lacrosse team’s behavior, guilt, or character. The closest contact with “the specific harms associated with the incident” is by way of one woman’s anxious imagination (“If something like this happens to me…”)—not a factual statement about the party but a representation of how vulnerable she felt. Whether or not it was it a good idea to put that quote in the ad without explanation or qualification is an excellent question—one of many about how effective or appropriate or representative the ad was. In principle they’re worth discussing, but not in a climate where those most interested in the ad insist on treating it as nothing more than a smoking gun. Questions like that are off track for me at the moment, anyway—all I’m trying to do here is explore the connections between Lubiano’s “Spectacularity” article, the listening statement, and the potbanging protest.

The reading that pulled the ad into the swirl of controversy dwelt especially on two lines—the mention of “what happened to this young woman” near the top, taken to indicate a firm belief that a rape occurred at the party, and the nod to “protesters making collective noise” near the end, which serves as a versatile link between the ad and anything a protestor has done or said about the lacrosse case. The central message of the ad as I see it doesn’t need a reference to protestors and doesn’t require the rape allegation to be true, so I don’t think either line is necessary as written. The mention of protestors seems especially superfluous, and it’s on that point that I’m most sympathetic to the criticism of the ad—it’s hard to reconcile the blanket endorsement of protestors followed by a long list of faculty signatures with the crowd on the sidewalk at Buchanan Blvd. holding a banner that says “Castrate” and hounding out the lacrosse team as rapists. I find it odd and disappointing that those who signed the ad and continued to speak out and editorialize didn’t meet the issue head on. Is all collective noise really good collective noise? The one line in the “concerned faculty” statement issued last January—“We do not endorse every demonstration that took place at the time”—was worse than nothing, I’m afraid, since all it did was to acknowledge that the issue was being dodged.

With the image of that crowd on the sidewalk in mind, it’s hard to reconcile the mention of protestors with an intention to steer clear of spectacularity. I have no way of knowing what image “protestors making collective noise” brought to mind for Lubiano in early April 2006, though I’m pretty sure it wasn’t that one. What is more clear is that even though the ad and the potbanging protest come from the same general political mindset, they are worlds apart in purpose and tone, and in exactly the way Lubiano articulates in her essay. The protest is addressed to “the most horrific possibilities”—a brutal gang rape—while, based on the student quotes she selected, Lubiano seems to be pushing for a day-to-day life at Duke in which African American students feel fully secure, confident that their perspective and experience won’t be dismissed when it’s inconvenient or challenging, and that they’re not marked as threats or colorful sex toys. If nothing else, the gulf between intention and interpretation makes a fascinating study in non-communication, and maybe there’s even something to be learned from it.

There’s another, more fundamental difference between the discourse of the protestors and the text of the ad, one that was aggressively sidelined when the latter became a rhetorical football: in the ad there’s an attempt to deal with people. It’s pretty successful, too—the quotes mesh with my experience of students at Duke, at least. The potbanging protest was, as I see it, conspicuously not about people but rather about pawns. My strong impression is that those who see the ad as rank prejudgment of the team read the quotes as the words of puppets. The reduction of people to pawns and puppets is a constant of ideologically polarized debate, whether you think of it as spectacularity or as culture war. There’s often a Hollywood semblance of humanity in the portrayal of the good side, but whether it’s the activist’s sanctified survivor or the bland but perfectly polarized sympathies that structure DIW, it’s something less than human. I think everyone involved knows and expects that they’re dealing with pawns (knows and expects it, that is, from the other side). The ad put humans on the favored side and leaves the other side open, to be filled in by the imagination of the reader. Considered in isolation, it’s an improvement on angels and fiends, but maybe not much different in context—readers sensitized by the broad-brush rhetoric directed at the team naturally drew on that to fill in the blank.

The first and perhaps the most admirable line of the ad—“We are listening to our students”—was another humanizing touch that may have had an unintentionally divisive effect, since it was only the favored group of students who were actually heard. I accept the implicit explanation of the choice of students to highlight—in general “the most vulnerable among us” because least well established, most likely to be alienated or marginalized or misunderstood. At that moment, though, among the most obviously vulnerable students were the ones under investigation by an unethical prosecutor. A less obvious group of students who might have been feeling especially vulnerable were the ones who were being stretched across the fault lines of race or gender or whatever. The point is that listening, of all things, shouldn’t and needn’t be selective, and it doesn’t seem like a good idea to give the impression that it is at a time of high tension and polarization. It’s a shame that the response of those who were offended by the ad has never, as far as I’ve seen, been to try to listen more closely and more broadly.

The legacy of the potbanging protest is not pretty. Rendering facile, sweeping judgment on 40-some young men they knew little about did a great service for the crowd on the other side that’s packaged the incident and its aftermath as a “hoax”—a story as comforting in its one-sided simplicity as in it’s perfect harmonization of justice, decency, and good sense with the good old social pecking order. It’s a position that needs a diametrical opposite in order to thrive—you have to have a lie in order to have a liestopper—and as the Liestoppers page I linked in earlier shows, the “Castrate” banner has a place of honor in the shrine that gives their project meaning and urgency. It’s not just that the protest left priceless relics for the other side’s endless re-incitement, though. It was in effect a conspiracy with the “rhetorical other” to make war on ambiguity from both sides. The only way for a case like this to shed useful light on the real, everyday harms of social or racial or gender inequity is to put it in a frame that’s wide enough to contain the ambiguity of real everyday people. Otherwise it’s just another cheesy comic book.

Speaking of that, the next stop is Wonderland…

How did protesters espousing an end to not only sexual violence but all violence convince themselves that it was a good idea to stand in front of the lacrosse players’ house on Buchanan Blvd. with a banner screaming “Castrate!!”? Even given the rally’s aim of confronting the lacrosse team to get them to talk, it’s hard to see what purpose such a vile but empty threat could serve, and also hard to imagine that no one involved realized how much it made them look like hypocritical, bloodthirsty zealots. Of course that’s all ridiculously easy to point out in retrospect. I don’t at all discount the genuine concern for victims of sexual assault—a terrible, debilitating crime—that motivated most if not all the protestors. I expect that some of the outrage came from brutally real personal experience of assault, something that far too many women have to live with. I can only go on what I can see and read, though, and in that the action is represented not only as a denunciation of the team but also righteous support for the woman alleging rape and for other assault survivors. The “Castrate” banner, which was likely the work of only a few of those present but was apparently tolerated all around, shows how much the action was ultimately defined by what was opposed rather than what was supported.

Behind the rally was a spirit of vigilantism. The call to protest that went out the night before (see below for a link) describes the alleged rape as a fact and says the lacrosse team has to be confronted because they’re “maintaining a strict code of silence.” The “Castrate” banner as well as the other slogans like “You can’t rape and run” and “It’s Sunday morning, time to confess” were apparently meant to break down the team’s resistance. The decision to shout down the team as rapists was based on incomplete, highly filtered, second- or third-hand information, or, in the case of the “code of silence,” misinformation. It’s all depressingly consistent with vigilantism’s bad rap. I get a whiff of mob psychology from the videos of the event on YouTube (especially the second one), which doesn’t mean I have any truck with the knee-jerk geniuses who imagine the potbanging crowd as some kind of lynch mob—it’s like saying a headache is the same as a brain tumor. I can’t blame activists acutely aware of sexual assault as a largely unacknowledged, unpunished crime for having an intense urge to do something. But I wish they’d treated the story the police were telling about a “wall of silence” with even a fraction of the skepticism they would have treated a story from the same source that was unfavorable to the accuser.

Provocative as it is, the “Castrate” banner didn’t attract much attention until months after the protests. A quick LexisNexis search finds only one mention of it immediately after the rally, in the next day’s Durham Herald-Sun—not something that found a lot of eyeballs, especially around Duke. My best guess is that the banner became a fixture in discussions of the case after the picture was included in an account of the protests posted on Liestoppers in Nov. 2006 (the post, which quotes the call to protest in full, is fairer and more informative than you’d think from all the bric-a-brac of grudge-nursing around it). It isn’t mentioned on DIW until Jan. 2007 (the single instance that seems to be from 2006 is misdated). Both the banner and the typical liestopper reaction to it perfectly follow the culture-war logic that pumping up your own indignation and hurting the other side trumps all else. While I was searching for background on the protest I stumbled across a post from John In Carolina, who took it to comic extremes by writing a letter to the editor complaining that The News and Observer didn’t even mention the “Castrate” banner for more than a year—imagine how many decent citizens were deprived of their full portion of moral outrage!

Speaking soon after the event in an MSNBC interview, Manju Rajendran, one of the protest organizers, describes the confrontational tone as an end in itself:

Women in Lima, Peru, initiated this as a way of surrounding the houses of women who were being assaulted by their husbands or by their partners. And it was a very confrontational way of saying, We demonstrate solidarity with the women who are being attacked in this way or by anyone who’s being persecuted in this fashion. We challenge the racism and the sexism and the classism implicit in these actions. We want to shame the attackers, and we want to invite the witnesses to step forward and come clean.

A little googling makes it clear that the cacerolazo is a common form of protest in Latin America, but I can’t find any examples that fit Rajendran’s description. In principle, especially in a place where incidents of sexual assault or domestic violence generate little attention (if not unhelpful attention) from the authorities, it sounds like a fine idea. But she transferred wholesale to Durham a response to a very different sort of rape, one involving intimate partners, from a very different context, the social framework of a tight-knit third-world neighborhood (that’s my inference, of course, but I can’t think of a plausible alternative), where among other things the effect of shame would be both more pointed and more contained.
The fact she was talking about the protest a few days later on nationwide TV shows how uncontained the shame and everything else was in her version. That the protest would send words and images ricocheting out of control around the media and the web seems utterly predictable (though I may just be indulging 20-20 hindsight).

One discrepancy is especially revealing. Unless there’s some kind of women’s brigade in Lima that responds to distress calls from here and there, the intervention Rajendran describes would have to be organized by women familiar with both the victim and her abuser. It seems to me that Rajendran wasn’t differentiating between her connection to the parties of the lacrosse allegation and the connection she’d have if, say, a friend or neighbor in an abusive relationship came to her for help (in which case a lot more deliberation would surely be involved before gathering a crowd to chant on the sidewalk). But knowing the accused and accuser by type and role—gender, race, class, titillated viewer or demeaned hireling, etc.—was apparently enough familiarity to call out the pots and pans on Buchanan Blvd.

An essay written by Durham-based activist Brian Proffitt in the wake of the protests and the negative DNA results is another window onto the reduction of the lacrosse team’s accuser to a type. In it he stresses his “commitment to believing those who come forward with stories of survival first.” His perspective is different from Rajendran’s, in that he’s writing as an advocate for assault survivors rather than a scourge of assaulters, but he and Rajendran both have ties to Ubuntu, a group founded in reaction to the lacrosse accusation, and my impression is that, whether or not he was involved in the potbanging protest, he is speaking from the same general perspective. Even when I disagree with him, I admire his forthright efforts to explain his position without rancor. He’s at his best writing as an advocate about the debilitating effects of sexual assault and the bleak prospects survivors have for a fair hearing, much less justice and resolution.

Proffitt also makes a couple of good points in support of his “commitment to believing.” One is that, for a woman going through the grueling process, simply being believed can make a big difference. The other is that bringing a charge of rape is typically a punishing and humiliating experience for the accuser—a natural deterrent to false allegations. Just how much of a deterrent is a matter of psychology and socialization, though—I don’t doubt that it’s enough to many women who have really been assaulted that they choose not to press charges. But there must be some who would be much less bothered, especially in our fame- and notoriety-driven culture. But Proffitt’s blanket faith is so ironclad that, in his writing about the lacrosse case there is no “accuser” (and no “allegation”), only a “survivor”—one of a sanctified class that’s “creating the path forward… [by] resisting violence, homophobia, transphobia, racism, sexism, and capitalism.” It’s a belief that would tend to short-circuit the difficult questions that should be asked before standing on a sidewalk and very publicly denouncing people accused of a serious crime, like whether the case fit the scenario in which false allegations are highly unlikely.

Coming up next, the dangers of perfection…

Although I’m a low-level member of the Duke faculty still for at least one more semester, I’m writing more from an outside than the inside perspective. I was part-time and “visiting” for most of my nine years at Duke, and I taught my last class (or so I thought) and moved out of my office at the end of this past spring semester. I haven’t been involved in any faculty or institutional response or discussion of the case, and none of the people at Duke who have played a public role in the controversies are friends or acquaintances of mine. All that makes it relatively easy to express myself frankly, but also means that I couldn’t, even if I wanted to, speak for the university, its administration, or any other member of the faculty. Any interpretations I offer are my own—I’m not in a position to defend the statements or actions that anyone else has made about the lacrosse case, and I’m not offering any such defenses.

I find looking back at the spring semester 2006 through the lens of the lacrosse case to be a little surreal, since the unfolding scandal left almost no impression on my own experience teaching a small and congenial class two afternoons a week. I had a deadline looming at the time and was only sporadically following developments in the news. I can’t say anything firsthand about the major incidents and events—protests and “wanted” posters and the like—except to make the obvious point that they weren’t ubiquitous. It’s a reminder of how selective and unrepresentative a picture of life on campus you get from the assembled highlights of the controversy—one of the things that doesn’t register is how much of it was boringly normal.

What’s on my mind isn’t so much the incident and legal proceedings as the remarkably polarizing and dysfunctional dialogue the case has spawned. The long letter Duke Provost Peter Lange sent to the faculty last January gives a pretty good idea of how it looked from the eye of the hurricane. The letter is so even-handed and deliberative that it’s hard to tell what’s the statement and what’s the statement about making a statement—it’s the antithesis of the quick and dirty texts “intended not to clarify but to embarrass, punish, demean or humiliate” that Lange was writing about. A fine model for a more illuminating discourse, but I don’t see any signs that either form or content made an impression. It is a little odd to read his carefully considered back-and-forth touching on language, rhetoric, debate, democracy, the technology of communication, etc.—all core academic issues—and then get to the part about the challenge ahead for Duke, which is… campus culture. Nothing is more fundamental to a liberal education than effective and responsible use of words, and surely there’s an academic agenda along those lines that can compliment whatever’s been decided about housing, drinking, and athletics. I’m not that tuned in to what’s happening on campus, though, so maybe it’s been press-released and Chronicled and I missed it.

The picture Lange paints is of extremist rhetoric silencing those who don’t want to be pummeled and pulling the rest toward the fringes. That fits with my impression that zealots have set both the terms and the tone of the discussion, kept it stoked with resentment, and whittled it down to stick figures and false choices. As a way to look at the mechanics behind all this, I’ve picked out two parties to the war of words, one collective and the other individual. Representing one side, the “potbangers“—activists who rallied on March 26, 2006 to denounce the lacrosse team at the site of their disastrous party on Buchanan Blvd. For the other side, KC Johnson, a professor at Brooklyn College and outspoken critic of critics of the lacrosse team, who blogs on Durham-in-Wonderland (DIW). Neither stands alone—I’m not claiming that either is single-handedly responsible for the way things have turned out. In the first few weeks after the news broke there were a number of rallies condemning the team’s actions and highlighting the issues of sexual assault and racism, some on campus and some off, and there were similar messages in the media and elsewhere. The potbanging protest left an especially deep impression on all that followed, though. And there are several other blogs and web sites dedicated to exposing the terrible injustice they believe has been done to the team. DIW seems to me the most influential and insidiously polarizing of them. Liestoppers is the grassroots hub of the network, though, and for my own convenience I’m going to refer to the community as a whole as “liestoppers.”

To some extent DIW and the potbanging protestors is an arbitrary pairing I’ve settled on by indulging the bad habit—one I share with most everyone else who commentates about the case—of writing first and foremost about the things that piss me off. Despite all sorts of differences, though, what the pair has in common (treating the protestors as a single perspective) is significant. Both were galvanized by an act they saw as despicable, and so blatantly true to type for the people who committed it that it was also a perfect scourge. Diametrically opposite the bad guys are some good guys, and the portrayals of both sides of the face-off are predictably skewed. The compromises that come from letting ends justify means are clear in both cases. The protestors, who I believe consider non-violence and compassion to be foundation principles, nonetheless took up intimidation and the suggestion of violence. The scathing critique of members of the Duke faculty on DIW trades on Johnson’s credibility as a professor and gives an impression of offended rationality but the core of it is both irrational and anti-academic. Other than the last few details, it’s the same old, same old of polemics and ideological crusades.

The “listening” statement—an advertisement placed in the Duke Chronicle on April 6, 2006 and endorsed by 88 people, mostly Duke faculty members—figures in both halves of the critique. It’s a document that might have been no more than a blip if it hadn’t been picked up by Johnson (it’s what focussed his attention on the case) and other bloggers. The way Johnson has been able to reduce the ad to exactly what’s useful to him is a good example of how the range of the conversation can be narrowed by a strident, polarizing voice. What I find especially interesting is the link between the “listening” statement and the potbanging protest, something Johnson has been able to exploit to great effect in spite of efforts when the ad was written to make much different points in a much different way than the protestors.

The issues raised by the ad and the minority students it represented didn’t deserve to be treated as special interests in a zero-sum game, and tempting as it is to think so, it wasn’t only the efforts of the ad’s critics that landed them there. The potbangers slotted the case into the frame of generalized Oppression, loading it down with moral clarity that obscured the particulars of the case. Other voices—professors, editorialists, pundits, etc.—pronounced the same black-and-white antithesis between the lacrosse team and the interests of women and minorities (and all decent, thinking people, of course). Following a time-tested script, the liestoppers fought back by turning the protestors’ perspective on its head while continuing to sing the same songs of victimization and prejudice, now in the circumscribed context of freakish outrages (which includes the Tawana Brawley scandal and I’m not sure what else).

It’s a narrow perspective that overcompensates with grandiose gestures of righteousness. One of my favorites is the name of the legal defense fund set up for the players, a perfectly reasonable cause that didn’t need the pretense—the Association for Truth and Fairness. Although it’s a brittle construct that requires blinders and constant vociferous defense, as a platform for defending the status quo it’s hard to do better than an understanding of Truth, Fairness, and Justice that hinges on the rare but spectacular victimization of society’s least vulnerable. And it’s a fine basis for drawing conclusions from the case about Duke or Durham or society in general without worrying about whether or not the players represent the kind of Duke students likely to be undermined or alienated by prejudice, or the kind of people likely to be victimized by the sex industry or to suffer from the whims of the justice system, among other things. On that last point Reade Seligmann was able to introduce a welcome dose of reality, and it’s not my claim that identifying strongly with the lacrosse players as victims of injustice—the basic motivation of liestoppers, I think—is incompatible with understanding and sympathy for other perspectives. But a point of view based on outrage, especially one as precarious as this, is driven to justify itself with rhetorical warfare that brings the battle lines into sharp relief. The easiest way to do that—standard practice on DIW—is to package the people in the line of fire into special interests to be attacked, dismissed or defended, and pretend nobody else exists.

For background on the case—if you just found your way to my blog from Mars or something—a good place to go is the Duke Chronicle’s Lacrosse scandal page. There is a small collection of articles about the “listening” statement and the 88 who signed it, including a link to the ad itself and an especially good account of the ad and it’s repercussions by Steve Veres. Duke News and Communication has a page with links to various press releases and reports. Finally, this past April Newsweek had a good retrospective on the scandal.

There’s a short postscript to this post about a squabble that illustrates some of my points. A detailed look at the two sides of the coin starts with potbanging.