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

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

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

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

Snore.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We try to hire the best, smartest people available,” Brandon said of his philosophy hires. “If, as John Stuart Mill said, stupid people are generally conservative, then there are lots of conservatives we will never hire.


“Mill’s analysis may go some way towards explaining the power of the Republican party in our society and the relative scarcity of Republicans in academia. Players in the NBA tend to be taller than average. There is a good reason for this. Members of academia tend to be a bit smarter than average. There is a good reason for this too.”

From the comments posted after the article you can get a pretty good sense of how that went over, or google “Robert Brandon” Duke stupid for a broader sample. Reflecting on the remark after “two days of venomous, hate filled e-mails from self-described ‘conservatives,’” Brandon said, “In my response to The Chronicle reporter I gave a quote from John Stuart Mill that I thought was quite funny. I now see that the humor is not much appreciated in this context.” In writing, at least, the remark strikes me as arrogant and not very funny, and I’m not sure that even sympathetic readers picked up much humor. But as a smoking gun in the crime of liberal bias the remark was very much appreciated—the Google search above calls up a little feeding frenzy of critics who were, on the whole, remarkably uncritical and opportunistic in their approach to such a useful quote. Recently it’s cropped up again as part of a minor farce.

[Here’s more about Mill’s theory of conservatives.]

It seems pretty obvious (to me, at least) that Brandon’s comment is just a pretentious version of the kind of reflexive, snarky put-down that each side of the political spectrum is constant throwing at the other. It takes a pretty shallow or self-serving perspective to assume that it’s deeply revealing of how he approaches decisions or interactions involving conservative students or faculty. That’s the sort of spin you’d expect from a partisan rag, and sure enough Rachel Zabarkes Friedman, writing for the National Review, put Brandon’s remark on her list of “five of the most outrageous campus incidents of the last academic year.” Her paragraph about it ends with a little idle speculation: “So why aren’t there more Republicans in academia? Maybe it’s because even the capable ones have been kept out, by the likes of Robert Brandon.” Unless she did a whole lot more investigating than it seems, she’s in no position to make generalizations about “the likes of Robert Brandon.” She has an uppity liberal-professor sock puppet who can mouth the words, though, and that suits the National Review just fine. But here’s one from a professor, Erin O’Connor, and she doesn’t do much better: “It says something about a department—if not the university as a whole—when its leader will come right out and say that the reason there aren’t more conservatives teaching college is that conservatives are stupid.” The claim about his department is especially empty. Other than the emphasis on philosophy of biology it looks like a pretty traditional philosophy department. It’s not clear how you’d find out if the chair’s comment about stupid conservatives really says something about them. It would definitely take some work, so why not just say it?

It’s a tedious and often disingenuous habit to treat attempts at humor, even those that bomb, as revelations of the real beliefs that the joker would otherwise deny or keep under wraps. All the conservative tut-tutting about Brandon’s remarks suggests that feminists aren’t the only ones who can’t take a joke (I’ll hand that off to the fabulous Nellie McKay at the end of the post). Joke or not, a quote relayed by a reporter is not the same as a first-person written statement. If Brandon had written the bit about Mill and stupid conservatives in an op-ed, presumably he would have made sure that his meaning came across in print, and it would make sense to treat it as a serious opinion. He may well be arrogantly clubby about the predominance of liberals in the humanities faculty, or he may be inclined to bullshit when he gets a question that he hasn’t thought much about, or he may have been blowing off steam after reading the ravings of some fringe professor pushing “Intelligent Design” as science. There are plenty more possibilities—I don’t know Prof. Brandon so I’m not suggesting any particular interpretation. My point is that the quote got the play that it did because it was useful—it’s actual significance is uncertain but was probably vastly overstated by his critics. It doesn’t say much for the seriousness of the cause of “intellectual diversity” that a glib remark to a campus newspaper has to be overinterpreted and oversold to make the case for it.

When it comes to using quotes for impact, with little regard for either their significance or their context, KC Johnson is hard to beat. About a year and a half after Brandon made his infamous comment, Johnson used it in an editorial for the Chronicle of Higher Education, a critical look at the explanations and justifications given by the “academic Establishment” for its leftwards imbalance. In retrospect it reads like a warmup for the anti-academic crusade he piggybacked on the lacrosse case—the narrowly-framed issues and boilerplate rhetoric were ready and waiting for the “listening” statement to come along. The editorial is a mix-and-match of quotes framed as evidence of bias but otherwise largely unanalyzed—The Cigarette Smoking Blog (!) has a handy list of some of them. I haven’t checked to see whether there’s any of the misrepresentation that he indulged in while writing about the lacrosse case. But even without digging through his sources it’s clear that he makes no meaningful distinction between George Lakoff speaking to the New York Times, Brandon joking to a student reporter, and some random professor blogging about who’s “f-ing smarter.” They’re treated as equally significant and representative—a fair sign, I think, that Johnson’s main interest is in what sounds good and makes points for his side.

Brandon’s quip about conservatives being stupid is circulating again because of a little farce that Inside Higher Ed recounts in a recent article—“In Culture Wars or Duke-Bashing, Do Facts Matter?” They didn’t to Edward Bernard Glick, an emeritus professor of political science at Temple University, when he wrote an editorial that ran in the Jerusalem Post and, with a somewhat different ending, on the website American Thinker. It’s an especially cranky and slapdash version of the formulaic rant about how everything’s going to hell (aka the academic declensionist narrative). Evil Bender goes into the gory details of Glick’s “logical fallacies, lack of evidence, lack of proper attribution, and… burning desire to pin all of society’s ills on the academy.” What I find interesting is that what drives the reasoning (such as it is) is assumptions about the people responsible for the decline.

He brings the anonymous bad guys on stage as protesters at the ‘68 Democratic national convention in Chicago. “[W]hat did these Marxist demonstrators and their cohorts elsewhere do next? They stayed in college. They sought out the easiest professors and the easiest courses.” Safe from the draft, they whiled away the Vietnam war lowering academic standards, and when the war was over they had nothing better to do than get tenure and transform the university into “the most postmodernist, know-nothing, anti-American, anti-military, anti-capitalist, Marxist institution in our society.”

Thanks to this takeover by ignorants, college graduates these days are “well trained, but badly educated”—they’ve been trained “to feel sad, angry or guilty about their country and its past” in an intolerant atmosphere in which “politically-correct feelings are now more important than knowledge,… logic, and critical thinking.” When it comes to Darfur, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, “Muslim hatred,” gas prices and the energy supply, they have everything completely wrong. The professors responsible for all this miseducating don’t make much money but they get “huge psychological incomes in the form of power.” They “shape the minds of their students” and control hiring, promotion, tenure, etc., so naturally they pack the faculty with like-minded comrades. (Facetiously, I think, John K. Wilson flips the point about income on its head—it’s the liberals who are stupid for going into such a low-paying profession).

Duke University is a case in point. Some time ago, a department chairman* was asked in an interview on NPR if his department hired Republicans. He answered (I paraphrase from memory): “No. We don’t knowingly hire them because they are stupid and we are not.”


If I were a in his field, Duke would never hire me, for I am a Republican, and a Jewish one at that. Moreover, when I was an active academic during and after the Vietnam War, I audaciously taught politically-incorrect courses: civil-military relations and the politics of national defense.


*Correction: The author initially identified the speaker as the chairman of Duke’s psychology department. This was an error of memory. The author and American Thinker apologize to the chairman in question and to readers for this error.

That’s the end of the article, and he really outdoes himself—not only casually misremembering Brandon’s remark but also slipping in a gratuitous suggestion of anti-semitism, a pat on his own back for bravely carrying the torch for some very conventional subjects, and a wonderfully inadequate correction. If that’s any indication of the quality of his work, it wouldn’t be his politics that kept Duke from hiring him.

[July 18: I pulled the above quote about a week ago—between July 11 and 14, I’m guessing. As of a day or two ago, American Thinker had lopped off the ending and expanded the correction. Today it’s reverted to what I quoted. Gotta wonder what’s up with that.]

Glick’s editorial reads like a feeble parody of Alan Kors’ much more articulate meditation “On the sadness of higher education” from a couple of months ago. Kors gives an especially eloquent account of the academic values he first encountered as an undergraduate, while Glick honors what’s been lost only in strident negatives. But both of them pin the decline on a bunch of ideologues who apparently have nothing to say for themselves that’s worth listening to. For Glick, it’s wild-eyed, wooly-headed “Marxists.” For Kors, it’s “careerist” administrators who have “given over the humanities, the soft social sciences and the entire university in loco parentis to the zealots of oppression studies and coercive identity politics.” In both cases it’s an intellectual cop-out—dismissive characterization in place of an argument. Johnson has given himself the space to take a more creative approach—misrepresenting, exaggerating, and “perfecting” the “race/class/gender extremists” on the Duke faculty to suit his self-righteous crusade. It’s as if, after playing the same video game for two years, he’s still perfectly content on level one, where he can effortlessly mow down the gangs of slow-moving evildoers.

I don’t dismiss concerns about intellectual diversity on campus (“ideological diversity” would be a more accurate term, though). The self-appointed conservative advocates of it—the ones I’ve been coming across—seem to be much more intent on discrediting and denouncing the left/liberal Establishment than on making a case that they represent valuable diversity. They suggest the opposite, in fact, with their willingness to cut corners intellectually. But I know of two professors who, by example, make good cases for the conservative contribution to intellectual diversity. The first is Michael Gustafson, an engineering professor at Duke who, during the lacrosse scandal, managed to be a voice of moderation while also speaking up for the lacrosse players and questioning the judgment of some of his colleagues. He seems to have been among the first to notice Glick’s sloppiness, and there’s a series of posts on his blog that traces his investigation. When he calls it “another unfortunate case of distortion being touted as fact in order to oversell a point…,” I’m guessing he’s looking back to the self-serving distortions that have been a staple of lacrosse-case debate (it’s all too easy to find the same thing elsewhere, of course).

Farther from home, there’s Matthew Woessner, an assistant professor of public policy at Penn State and the subject, along with his wife and professional collaborator, April Kelly-Woessner, of an engaging profile published in The Chronicle of Higher Education early this year. With respect to the debates about intellectual diversity, what sets both conservative husband and liberal wife apart is their committed empiricism—they don’t just debate their disagreements, they go out and do a study. One of their studies documented an effect, generally negative, of professors’ overt politics on students’ engagement and appreciation. Another found that differences in interests and personal values seemed to go a long ways towards explaining why liberals are more likely to pursue PhD studies than conservatives. That doesn’t settle the issue, but it’s a refreshing change from dogma and tribalistic rhetoric.

Woessner also defies the conventional wisdom from the Right that surfaces, for instance, in most any comment thread where academic political bias is in play. For instance: “I was a university faculty member for 14 years and I can absolutely confirm what happens to faculty when they have a difference of opinion with the prevailing groupthink.” I don’t doubt that some people are effectively drummed out of academia for not toeing the liberal line. It’s sure not Woessner’s experience, though—he says “he never confronted intolerance in the classroom. Even some of his most liberal professors went out of their way to solicit his views.” That may not be typical or even common—I really don’t know. I do know that some of us are thrilled to have students who are willing and able to articulate a perspective that contrasts or conflicts with our own.

Gustafson and Woessner show in practice how valuable conservative voices can be to a left-leaning university faculty. But what they bring to the table is more than a party affiliation. There’s a willingness to engage with and respect the other side, and a real commitment to honest, constructive debate. To some extent it probably comes down to personality, and I don’t want to suggest that the only good conservative academics are the ones who make nice. Looking at the opposite extreme, though, Glick’s article is neither constructive nor very honest. If that’s what conservatives have to offer—more right-wing noise trying to drown out the prevailing left-wing noise—it’s not much use as diversity (I should note that it’s not an issue Glick takes up). It seems to me that many of the advocates of intellectual diversity are much closer to Glick than Gustafson, too ready to engage in all-out rhetorical warfare, letting the ends justify the means. A little more leading by example might be nice.

Speaking of people who can’t take a joke, Nellie McKay has something to say…

Before I get into the gory details, I need to acknowledge some feedback that I’ve been sitting on for months. After my posts about the lacrosse case way back in December, I got email from faculty at Duke as well as a few other institutions. All of it was was civil, and most appreciated. One senior professor at Duke took me politely to task for telling only one side of the story when I wrote about the hateful email that faculty members critical of the lacrosse team have received.

Please don’t continue to write about evil outsiders silencing thoughtful Duke faculty without also noting that some of us on that faculty have been both castigated and shunned by fellow faculty members who believe we have no right to disagree, in public, with their view of the world.

In confidence he briefly outlined some of his experiences in the thick of the controversy. They are like a faculty-level counterpart to the comments left by my former student Nick. I can see how it would touch a nerve if I seemed to be painting a picture of campus that had all of the intolerance flowing in one directions, towards the faction that’s been attacked for betraying the lacrosse team. That’s certainly not what I had in mind, and I’m happy for the opportunity to reemphasize that. It’s a chance to reinforce another point as well. I don’t know “what really happened” at Duke as the controversy played out (I put it in quotes because I don’t see how so many perspectives could be boiled down to one definitive thing). Even when I was on campus I was in a bubble at the time. I try to be mindful of how much I don’t know, no doubt with mixed success, and I appreciate the first-hand accounts that help to keep me on track. I’m constantly amazed, though, at how much other people writing about the case feel they know based on highly filtered and biased impressions.

I’m not sure whether or not the professor I just quoted would put himself in the same boat as Steven Baldwin. Either way, his language reflects the view of Johnson and like-minded critics that Baldwin is a prime example of a professor “castigated and shunned” for public statements—a thoughtful Duke faculty member silenced by evil insiders. I didn’t write about the controversy over Baldwin’s editorial because I wanted to turn that picture on its head—as far as I’m concerned the episode lends credence to my correspondent’s claims. What bothered me was FIRE’s belief that they knew exactly what happened when in fact they took the two controversial published letters and slotted them into a prefabricated narrative—the shrill, narrow-minded feminist forcing the brave critic who stood up to the mob to “kneel down at the altar of political correctness.” For all I know that’s not be far from the truth, but despite its supposed non-partisanship there are no signs that anyone at FIRE did the investigation it would take to put the reflexive impression to a test. There’s nothing about Weigman’s letter that strong-armed Baldwin, a tenured professor who came out with rhetorical guns blazing, into apologizing and then shutting up. If the “faculty allied with Professor Wiegman” really “proceeded to torment” Baldwin in order to silence him, as FIRE’s Harvey Silverglate thinks they did, it was unwarranted and inexcusable. It would have been better for all concerned if the exchange between Baldwin and Weigman had gotten past denunciation and disappointment and the two had attempted to speak to each other’s concerns about the treatment of the lacrosse players and campus culture. A letter sent to President Broadhead demanding that Baldwin be fired sure sounds like a fit of intolerance. I have no reason to doubt there was such a letter but I can’t find any details about it in FIRE’s article or on DIW or in the Duke Chronicle—like so much of the “evidence” of misbehavior by Duke faculty, its vagueness invites you to slap it down on the usual suspects. The interview with Baldwin that prompted FIRE’s article sheds no light on that letter or the other undercurrents of the controversy. Like the anonymous correspondent I quoted, he might not want to publicly air the details of his personal interactions, and for good reason. But he’s not shy about airing well-worn generalizations about Duke’s incoherent “militant hyper PC faculty.”

I wish when I said my piece about Baldwin I’d been aware of Michael Gustafson’s comments about the incident. They didn’t change my general impression of the exchange but they provide an excellent balancing perspective. Perhaps it’s his training as an engineer, but Gustafson stands out as a bridge builder in landscape full of people digging moats. Based on his experience with Wahneema Lubiano and Karla Holloway (here as well) it seems that it was possible to publicly disagree with vocal critics of the lacrosse team without being castigated and shunned. His example may be an implicit rebuke to the correspondent I quoted, but not necessarily—academic interactions are inevitably effected by things like seniority, reputation, department affiliation, and administrative history as much as they are by personality. What he does show is that it was possible to approach the controversy with strong opinions and still hear and respect and even learn from those who saw things differently. I can only hope that those who spoke across their differences with Gustafson learned something as well.

In my first post about the case I floated a two-sides-of-the-coin view of lacrosse-case discourse. I then proceeded to disappoint a number of readers for not delivering the balanced analysis they felt I had promised. What was on my mind wasn’t balance but symmetry, between two stances that in the extreme insisted that only one thing about the case really mattered, and got their point across by stigmatizing a group representing a large class of undesirables. It’s numbingly familiar culture-war stuff, especially the controversy about Duke faculty—the legal drama involved concrete details that saved it from being so nebulous.

What disappoints me about both sides of the campus-culture debate is a lack of interest in the quality of the thinking and criticism in general, not just the stuff coming from the other side. We can’t help but be more sensitive to the generalizations that opponents try to slap on us and those we identify with, but no matter what angle it comes from, academics should be bothered when typecasting passes for thought. A few professors at Duke who saw the incident as a symptom of social ills had trouble telling the difference between individuals living in the community and cardboard cutouts. Many more don’t seem to have noticed or responded to the reflexive judgment and condemnation that was circulating in the name of one progressive cause or another. There was in-class sermonizing about the case, faculty venting their opinion in interactions with the players, an allegation of grade retaliation that was dealt with but not publicly resolved. And as the letter-writer attests, some reacted to alternate perspectives on the team and the case with intolerance. What I find especially troubling is how it veers towards vigilantism. This was especially obvious off campus at the potbanging protest, but the same spirit was behind various kinds of pressure and persuasion directed at the lacrosse team to step forward and spill their guts that came from people at all levels of Duke, including faculty.

I see the demanding, hateful, and threatening attacks on faculty as the symmetrical counterpart to the vigilantism directed at the lacrosse players—as attempts based on incomplete and self-serving impressions to impose some measure of the punishment that wasn’t forthcoming from, say, the Duke administration. Whether the parallel is valid is irrelevant when it comes to judging the rhetoric, nor are the messages more or less excusable because they had more or less of an effect on the people who were targeted. I don’t know what effect they had. It seems to me pretty facile to expect the people on the receiving end to be completely unaffected, but they’re certainly not a blanket excuse for anything. For my purposes they’re a measure of how dysfunctional the debate has been. And with respect to the climate of debate, the very best that can be said about Johnson is that he did nothing significant to resist the haters whose rhetoric was informed to some extent by his blog. After working through the details of his criticism of Holloway and Neal it looks quite a bit worse than that to me. Virtually all of Johnson’s criticism of both of them is, in one way or another, a matter of reducing them to type.

For Johnson, the “listening” statement seems to have unmasked its endorsers as prisoners of race/class/gender groupthink. There’s no denying that the ad reflects a perspective that makes a great deal of race, gender, and class, and it seems to have offered a fine opportunity to shine a spotlight on the academic-left mindset—a valuable thing to do, in principle. But Johnson leaves no room for anything but a narrow-minded parody of the mindset. Once he pegged the ad’s endorsers as those kind of people, he got to work finding evidence to underscore the impression while avoiding most anything likely to challenge it. When he rummages through their papers, syllabi, lecture titles, comments to reporters, attendance at meetings and conferences, etc., it’s to show that they’re doing and saying just what’s expected. Comments about the lacrosse incident serve the same purpose and in addition show the professors’ ill-will or prejudice towards the lacrosse team. At his most selective he reads their texts with the fine-tuned sensitivity of a drug-sniffing dog reading a suitcase, and like the dog makes a lot of noise if he finds something and if not quietly moves on. Some texts, on the other hand, need to be reworked to suit his purposes. He must at least occasionally make points at the expense of another professor without doing violence to their words, but not in the cases I’ve studied.

[Many of the points I’m making here, or something close to then, have been kicked around by Timothy Burke and Scott Eric Kaufman of Acephalous, who posted on KC Johnson, posted some more, then made a final statement, and then said his absolute, positive last words on the subject (there are extensive and sometimes astute comments on all those posts, as well).]

The raw material can be boiled down in ways other than being selective. Johnson isn’t averse to the pigeonholing effect of labels as a labor-saving form of prosecution—if he can get a tag like “anti-lacrosse extremist” to stick he’s made his case. A variation of the same reductive impulse is his habit of isolating a quote for the person who said it to wear around Wonderland like a badge. He does it most effectively with Neal, who’s reduced to an epithet—“ThugNiggaIntellectual.” The pretense is that it’s Neal’s own term, something that justifies bringing it up but doesn’t justify producing an empty-headed caricature—Johnson spares himself and his readers a challenge by covering it with mud.

Neal handed Johnson some perfect material, so disposing of him is just a matter of repetition and rhetoric. Holloway takes more effort. Johnson picks an article of hers apart from beginning to end and misinterprets or misrepresents most of it. Both professors are misrepresented by the huge disparity between Johnson’s narrow and opportunistic attention to evidence and the sweeping implications that rest on it. There are no clear bounds to his criticism—it extends as far as time, material, interest, and themes like “Academic McCarthyism” and the “race/class/gender trinity” take him. It gives an overwhelmingly negative impression of those he’s targeted—of their quality as people, scholars and teachers and their value and influence at Duke. But he devotes his attention to a miniscule part of what they’ve done or said, and with little thought to what’s normal and what’s exceptional.

A disturbing symptom of the free-floating, unbounded criticism is self-evident evidence. The most dramatic example is Neal’s epithet—a term that’s so obviously outrageous that as far as Johnson is concerned it calls for no analysis at all—it is what it is and says what it says. But low-key versions of the same kind of thing crop up periodically, often in the form of reminders of how ludicrous or offensive the “loopy left” Duke faculty can sound to mainstream ears. For example, Holloway making too much of a fuss about her “bi-dialectal” blackness, a list of Wahneema Lubiano’s idealogically-suspect opinions, or titles of talks or entries in syllabi with the words “queer” or “queering” in them.
Either completely unprocessed or spiced up with a little light fear-mongering (“This is the sort of class that the Campus Culture Initiative wants to require for all Duke students”), what’s being cultivated is a superficial response to material that’s suspicious or offensive in some obvious way—a reaction that usually falls in the range between dismissal, disgust, and derision. If Johnson shows no sign of having thought about it, why should the reader?

He does much the same thing with the “Castrate” banner. Its connection to those who endorsed the “listening” statement is purely literalistic, and the significance of the connection is apparently obvious. Johnson shows no interest in either refining the impression or exploring the implications—any careful consideration of the real-world aspects of dozens of professors consciously endorsing a threat of castration (one that went virtually unreported for six months) would only weaken the incriminating effect of invoking the banner without comment. And then there’s Neal’s fantastically provocative term. Johnson is right—these pieces of undigested evidence do indeed speak for themselves. The problem is that they say one sort of thing to curious, skeptical readers, another thing to angry, superficial readers, and something else to guys like “Bill White,” who commented in a voice mail for Neal (quoted by Charles Piot) that “[l]istening to your voice, it sounds like you’re one of those smarty-art niggers, as opposed to the actual thug nigger intellectual and dangerous nigger that you claim to be,” and signed off with a “hope that one day you end up swinging from a tree.”

In criticizing Holloway and Neal, Johnson reproduces the self-serving circular reasoning of bigots. It’s reasoning that’s driven in most every respect by the judgments being rendered, and what counts as evidence is carefully selected and tailored for that purpose. Whatever supports the simplistic, moralistic narrative is highlighted, most everything else is kept offstage. It’s no surprise that at the conclusion both professors turn out to be irrational extremists—that was the premise as well. On top of the reductive analysis is a free-floating layer of provocation with an impact proportional to the prejudice the reader brings to it. To pitch this package as the rational analysis of a dedicated intellectual takes a whole lot of chutzpa, or a genius for self-deception. It’s a miserable way to defend academic values, though.

I don’t for a minute think Johnson is a hard-core racist like the one who called Neal. For that matter, I don’t think he’s a garden-variety bigot, and I can’t say whether bigotry drives his attacks on people like Holloway and Neal or it’s some other complex that makes him pathologically judgmental. Casual remarks notwithstanding, I’m not interested in judging him as a person. I don’t know that much about him, and I’m wary of the easy, cynical explanations for his crusade, e.g., getting back at the kind of people who tried to drum him out of Brooklyn College. My sense is that somewhere behind all the rhetoric is sincere concern for students and justice and academia.

But it’s not fortuitous that the “commentariat” on DIW has a full helping of careless, biased, and judgmental readers. And while I don’t think Johnson wants to make common cause with the “Bill Whites” of the world, he seems to be more than content to be surrounded by a contingent of “blog hooligans”—even the name, worn with pride as far as I can tell, reflects the spirit of vigilantism that’s dogged the controversy. There may be fundamental differences between Johnson and readers who state their judgments in more derogatory terms, but the only difference that’s clear and consistent in DIW is a superficial one—Johnson “maintains a certain decorum,” as Piot puts it. That’s not to say that everyone who comments on DIW or follows it with interest is a thoughtless voice in a vengeful mob. I’m sure it’s possible to approach DIW critically and get something worthwhile out of it. One of its draws seems to be the impression that Johnson is a hard-nosed critic dealing in factual evidence. That may be true some of the time—Johnson definitely has a head for detail—but the parts I’ve been studying are virtually fact-free. Beyond raising some issues and linking to sources, I don’t see how his concentrated criticism of either Holloway or Neal could possibly count as informative. He’s capable of doing better. There’s an constructive discussion of the difficult issue of diversity hiring in his “group profile” of Bill Chafe, for instance, but it’s atypical even within a series of posts that’s mostly a catalog of ideologically and/or intellectually suspect scholarship. I’m afraid that Johnson’s attacks on Holloway and Neal are much more representative samples of his academic-culture criticism. His case against Lubiano is the only other one where I’ve studied his sources in detail, and he seems to have done the same thing to her as he did to Holloway.

I’m not writing about DIW as a whole. I think (and hope) that what I’m writing about here is the worst part of it. For reasons that I can’t fathom, there are people who must be at least as smart and critical as me who find the case against 88-plus Duke faculty to be compelling, including some reviewers of Until Proven Innocent, the book Johnson cowrote. But a recent review in The Nation that rings true for me puts the anti-faculty crusade down firmly as a side show (former Duke professor Stuart Rojstaczer says much the same in his review). In the Nation Robert Perkinson does a fine job of putting some perspective around the part of the lacrosse story that really matters—the legal issues that can quite literally be a life-or-death matter, as Perkinson shows with admirable directness. My sense is that his assessment of what’s valuable in the book and what’s a self-serving distraction fits DIW fairly well too.

Whatever’s wrong with DIW doesn’t automatically translate into something that’s right on the other side, where plenty is still unresolved. The Duke faculty who Johnson opposed have yet to address the issues of tone and tolerance around campus. The lack of attention to those problems is symptomatic of something that got quite a bit of play on DIW—the tendency of this contingent of academics to stick to their own conversations about their own concerns and in their own often explicitly politicized terms. Much of the complaining about faculty behavior had to do not with what was said but with what wasn’t said—a valid but awkward kind of criticism since in principle it applies to a lot of people evenly but in practice it seems to reflect mostly on the people who call attention to themselves in some other way. Keeping that caveat in mind, I’m bothered by two papers about the lacrosse controversy that Duke faculty have published in academic journals in the past six months or so. Both are responses to the attacks by Johnson and others from within the Duke faculty contingent that was attacked. The first one to come out, by Charles Piot, published in Transforming Anthropology, is a critique and rebuttal of DIW. The more recent one, by Robyn Wiegman, Wahneema Lubiano, and Michael Hardt, published in the Winter 2007 issue of Social Text, looks more broadly at the ideological dimension of the controversy. The papers themselves are fine as far as I’m concerned—they dovetail pretty well with the things I’ve written (there has been some pointed criticism of Piot’s article, though). But sad to say it’s just what you’d predict from reading DIW that this group of professors would retreat to the safety of their room and theorize the right-wing assault that just rattled their office doors. That kind of sour grapes is poor motivation for anything, but even out of self-interest it seems like some stock-taking is called for. In Social Text the authors list the issues that informed their side of the tug-of-war on campus: “faculty… wanted [university officials] to address alcohol abuse, sexual assault, sports privilege, and race and gender supremacies….” How well did those faculty do with respect to those issues? How about the broader community with the same general political orientation? There must be things that, in retrospect, could have been handled better, things worth remembering so that those issues fare better in future culture-war flare-ups. It would be nice, though, if some of the people who lived through the intense cycle of events on campus were able to reflect on it in a way that’s not so completely structured and judged around the ideological fault lines. I imagine one thing that gets fried when you’ve been a lightning rod is any interest you might have had in public candor. But when I look over all that’s been said and written about the lacrosse controversy, I feel like stances and assumptions that set the tone early on have been left hanging, calling out for a follow-up.

Read on, if you really want to, about Holloway or Neal.