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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s not surprising that DIW plays well to the anti-intellectual crowd, since Johnson is telling them exactly what they want to hear. I don’t understand how anyone who’s pro-intellectual can swallow the academic-culture side of DIW. It’s especially disconcerting that conservative academics—an embattled minority, or so they say, but presumably still pro-intellectual—are so pleased by Johnson’s dogged prosecution of the “loopy left” that they don’t care how many corners he cuts or how much he caters to ignorance to do it. As long as he’s nailing the guilt-presuming purveyors of bias and relativism, there seems to be no expectation that he should rise to a higher intellectual standard himself.

I’ve been browsing the academic blogosphere trying to understand this disconnect. A link from DIW led me to Erin O’Connor’s blog Critical Mass, where it seemed I might find a more reflective version of Johnson’s general perspective on academia. Her tone is less strident and her interests are more flexible. On the other hand, she describes her blog as “a running chronicle of cant on American campuses,” so the focus is not on what’s typical or representative, it’s on what’s outrageously or pathologically extreme (like the Aliza Shvarts scandal at Yale, which was her main topic during the latter half of April). Even if the targets are chosen from across the political spectrum, it’s a focus that’s good at generating horror and scorn but not so good at fostering understanding. And as far as I can tell, O’Connor’s radar is consistently aimed to the left—maybe she thinks that’s where cant always comes from. DIW is chock-full of right-wing cant, though it’s easy to be oblivious to it if you’re energized by the rhetoric or fooled by the smoke screens (this can’t be a right-wing blog, I support Obama!).

O’Connor posted a long excerpt of Kors’ article, adding a little commentary that highlights his role as co-founder, with Harvey Silverglate, of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). It’s an organization that seems to have a lot of credibility, and not just with the conservative set. I’m sympathetic to their stated cause, and as far as I can tell they’re above-board and effective in pursuing it. But I’m not impressed by the one-sided attention to the lacrosse case on their web site or by Silverglate’s pontification on the subject. I left a comment on O’Connor’s post wondering about some of this and suggesting that for Kors and Silverglate, as for Johnson, ideological considerations trump intellectual standards. The responses were pretty routine, though J.A. DeLater gets some brownie points for metaphorically linking career academics to cockroaches because “[they] can tolerate much higher levels of toxic radiation than humans.”

I tried to post a follow-up comment but apparently the dog ate it. For the record, I’ve attached it to the end of this post. I had the same experience with DIW a few weeks ago. I can’t see any good reason for rejecting either comment—it seems most likely that Johnson and then O’Connor decided that it was easiest to duck the challenge (but I would think that, wouldn’t I?). Given his laissez-faire comment policy and the trivializing insinuation he’d put into my mouth, it was especially questionable coming from Johnson. But nobody owes it to me to post my comments, and it’s possible one or the other was lost through an error or a glitch. [O’Connor’s explanation, which I have no trouble accepting, is that it was knocked out by her spam filter]

When I read all of Kors’ article, it seemed like the product of a split personality, and that O’Connor’s quote only represented one side. In the first part of the article, he looks back at his formative years as a scholar, gracefully evoking the atmosphere of committed intellectualism that drew him in.

The academic world that I first encountered was one of both intellectual beauty and profound flaws. I was taught at Princeton, in the early 1960s—in history and literature, above all—before the congeries that we term “the Sixties” began. Most of my professors were probably men of the Left—that’s what the surveys tell me—but that fact was never apparent to me, because, except in rare cases, their politics or even their ideological leanings were not inferable from their teaching or syllabi. Reasoned and informed dissent from professorial devil’s advocacy or interpretation was encouraged and rewarded, including challenges to the very terms of an examination question. In retrospect, professors who must have disagreed fundamentally with works such as David Donald’s Lincoln Reconsidered (with its celebrated explanation of the abolitionists’ contempt for Lincoln in terms of the loss of status of their fathers’ once-privileged social group) assigned them for our open-minded academic consideration. My professor of Tudor-Stuart history, emerging from the bitter Oxbridge debates over explanations of the English Civil War in terms of class conflict, assigned Jack Hexter’s stunning Reappraisals in Social History to us. When I opined to him somewhat apprehensively that Hexter appeared to have exposed the tendentious use of statistics in my professor’s own prior work, he replied, “You’re absolutely correct.” These were not uncommon experiences in Princeton’s classrooms, and I knew, then and there, that I wanted both to do history and to teach.

In grad school at Harvard, while a few dates left in the midst of dinner on discovering my free- market and hawkish politics, and while I did get thrown out of a party for opposing, when asked, Eugene McCarthy’s view of Vietnam (this should have been a warning), the classroom remained open and, by design, intellectually pluralistic. In our graduate colloquium, we read the major historiographical debates, in works theoretical and monographic, and critical acumen was acknowledged in the force of an argument, not in its political provenance…. In the midst of the “cultural revolution” of the early 1970s, I co-founded a College House and lived warmly with students who mostly ranged from liberal Democrats to true believers of the New Left. They loved to discuss everything, and they did so in good faith and (almost) always ad rem. My students, whom I still meet frequently outside of class, still love to discuss everything, and they still do so in good faith and without ad hominem distractions from real conversation and debate. Critics of higher education who blame students for today’s catastrophes are categorically wrong about agency. It is the faculties (both the minority of zealots and the majority of cowards) and the administrations (both the minority of ideologues and the majority of careerists with double standards) who are to blame.

The academic world I so loved revealed itself best in an undergraduate course I’d taken on the history of Europe in the twentieth century. When the professor, a distinguished intellectual of the Left, returned the midterms to the hundred plus or so of us who were in his course, he said that we’d saddened and embarrassed him. “I gave you readings that allowed you to reach such diverse conclusions,” he explained, “but you all told me what you thought I wanted to hear.” He informed us that he would add a major section to the final exam: “I’m going to assign the book I disagree with most about the twentieth century. I’m not going to ask you to criticize it, but, instead, to re-create its arguments with intellectual empathy, demonstrating that you understand the perspectives from which he understands and analyzes the world.” I was moved by that. The work was Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, and it changed the course of my intellectual and moral life. It also showed me immediately how I wanted to teach as an intellectual historian. Each year, I teach thinkers as diverse as Pascal and Spinoza, Hobbes and Butler, Wesley and Diderot. I offer courses on intellectual history, and the goal of my teaching is to make certain that my students understand the perspectives and rich debates that have shaped the dialogue of the West. I don’t want disciples of my worldview. I want students who know how to read deeply, how to analyze, how to locate the essential points of similarity and divergence among thinkers, and, indeed, how to understand, with intellectual empathy, how the world looks from the diverse perspectives that constitute the history of European thought. I know that I am not alone, but I also know, alas, that I am in a distinct minority in my pedagogical goals in the humanities and the so-called social sciences.

Even with his admirable determination not to treat those times as a golden era—he acknowledges and deplores the racism, sexism, snobbery, and intolerance—there’s still some rose-coloring. If I wrote about my time at Reed College in the early 80s it would probably be colored in much the same way. I remember it as high-minded time and place, with some fine, challenging, dedicated teachers. What I see around me and what happens in my own classes never seems to rise to quite the same level.

Johnson has worked hard to portray a contingent of Duke professors as threats not only to students but to the integrity of the university. Those associated with African & African American Studies (AAAS) and Women’s Studies, especially, have been criticized for sacrificing academic standards to their extremist political agendas. I take the concern seriously, if not the rhetoric—it’s intellectual poison for professors to get into the business of indoctrination. Reading DIW did get me thinking about the issue, but I’ve waded through plenty of the alarmist rhetoric Johnson’s thrown at it and come up with virtually nothing of substance that’s either constructive or insightful. In three paragraphs that evoke a free-ranging dialog of ideas—an intellectual climate that’s not simply tolerant but actively seeks out challenging alternatives—Kors conveys more about the fundamental academic values at stake than Johnson has managed to fit into a few hundred thousand agenda-driven words.

When Johnson talks about the ideals of his profession, he seems to be referring to respect for due process and adherence to the faculty handbook—he doesn’t show any particular interest in the values that Kors highlights, so I probably shouldn’t expect his criticism to be guided by them. It’s harder to fathom why Kors lovingly wraps his souvenir only to toss the package out the window in order to grind his culture-war axe. He’s editorializing, not bouncing ideas around in a seminar, so it’s true that in the end scholarly neutrality has to take a back seat. But where is the spirit behind “read[ing] deeply,… locating essential points of similarity and divergence among thinkers,… [and] understand[ing], with intellectual empathy, how the world looks from the diverse perspectives that constitute the history of European thought”? If that’s the attitude that best serves students in the classroom, how is it that the readers of the New Criterion are best served by ditching it?

Turning to the contemporary university, Kors finds what seems to be an entirely new species of professor—careerists who mean no harm but are at the mercy of a reflexive ideology:

To understand why and to understand one of the few vulnerabilities of universities to actual accountability and reform, one must understand the hierarchy that predicts academic institutional behavior: sexuality (in their language, “sexual preference”) trumps neutrality; race properly conceived easily trumps sexuality; sex properly conceived (or, in their language, “gender”) easily trumps race; and careerism categorically trumps everything. From that perspective, the careerists who run our campuses have made a Faustian bargain (though they differ on which is the devil’s portion)….. From diverse motives of ideological sympathies and acute awareness of who can blackball their next career moves, they 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 the latter case, it truly has been a conspiracy, with networking and common plans. In the former case—the professoriate and the curriculum—it is generally, with striking politicized exceptions, a soft tyranny of groupthink, unconscious bias, and self-inflated sense of a mission of demystification. Most of the professors I meet are kind, indeed sweet, and certainly mean no harm. It is profoundly sad to see what they have become.

One thing Kors and Silverglate have in common is ready access to the pathos of the decline and fall of the academy. Kors’ “profoundly sad” conclusion echos a remark Silverglate made about Duke chemistry professor Steven Baldwin—that it was “unbearably sad” that Baldwin ended up apologizing for the scathing criticism of Duke’s administration and some of its faculty in his October 2006 op-ed.

Kors’ facile reduction of a large segment of the university to a simplistic ideology brings the Baldwin incident to mind in other ways. According to Johnson and Silverglate, what happened after Baldwin’s op-ed was published was that left-wing ideologues—the group Kors is lamenting—ganging up on him because he dared to buck their agenda. That may or may not be what happened, as far as I can tell. What’s striking to me is that those who take Baldwin’s side are determined to reduce the incident to that one single thing, no matter what. They’re horrified by Robyn Weigman’s charge that Baldwin used “the language of lynching,” but they can’t seem to imagine any legitimate objections to Baldwin’s suggestion that certain (unnamed) colleagues should be tarred and feathered and then run out of the academy on a rail. That starts looking a lot like a self-serving delusion when you realize that the only trace of this onslaught against Baldwin that’s come to light is two letters—Weigman’s published response and Kerrie Haynie’s personal email—and the latter doesn’t fit the narrative of shrill pc outrage at all.

No professor at Duke was a more outspoken advocate of the university in loco parentis than Baldwin. Personally, I’m almost as bothered by his paternalistic certainty that we should all be treating our students as “our kids” as I am by his enthusiasm for summary justice. The parental overtones of the op-ed don’t seem to have been much on Silverglate’s mind, but it’s still ironic that he seems to find the philosophy laudable—he certainly doesn’t make any object to it—while Kors finds it deplorable.

It would be pretty fruitless to try to refute Kors’ sweeping conclusions, especially since they’re drawn from personal experience. I’ll pull up a few texts associated with the lacrosse case, though, to suggest that he’s chosen to face down a flock of cardboard cutouts instead of taking up the other side’s perspective as a challenge.

In the Social Text article that figured in my last two posts, Robyn Wiegman, Wahneema Lubiano, and Michael Hardt have quite a bit to say about the university in loco parentis. They see the university before the revolutions of the 60’s as an analogue of the patriarchal family. The student revolutions forced an end to that paternalism, but according to the authors the parental model has made a comeback in a somewhat different guise, serving the business interests of the institution, not the political interests of any of its faculty.

As various historians of the U.S. university have noted, the reemergence of parental logics in the aftermath of student revolts has been accomplished primarily by legal, not moral or ethical, debate. Kinship obligations manage the imaginary realm in which the university’s need to protect its students from mental health problems, addictive behaviors, and violence to the self or others arises from its need to protect itself from its students and their increasingly litigious parents. It’s a complicated negotiation: the cultivation of students as “our kids” functions in order to safeguard the university from the violence and abuse that our kids might do to themselves and to others, with the specter of lawsuits constantly looming in the background. …

The good parents of today’s university live in the student service sector. It functions as the relay between demands for the university to address the students’ needs as members of specific groups (whether gender, racial, ethnic, national, or sexual) and the institution’s investment in the renewed cultivation of the parental model. Under the auspices of student services, the new publics that accompanied student revolt can be corralled back into the cultivation of the student as the institution’s child and as its future donor. … To say, then, that student services becomes the means to acknowledge the importance of race and gender in the form of consigning them to the realm of student life is to mark the way that the force of student rebellions has been managed, in much the same way that the primary discourse mobilized by these agencies—of social justice, fairness, and equity—has been reproduced in the service of empowering those who were once its targets.

In this context, it is important to note how the early historical ties between student centers and the intellectual projects of race and gender studies have been disarticulated in this process. On many campuses, in fact, there is growing antagonism between the two entities. In the relation between women’s studies and women’s centers, for instance, it is often the stance toward sex and sex publics that generates a rift, especially when scholars who work in queer studies, human rights, and sex trafficking do not follow the reigning discourses of women’s empowerment that so closely analogize sex and oppression. University administrations have found a certain relief in the constituency languages that student services provides, in part because these languages displace the problem of attending to the knowledge challenges that rigorous attention to the study of gender and racial formation raises.

The only way I could really evaluate this analysis would be to work through some examples, taking into account the practical problems of managing a community of thousands of post-adolescents who are making their first steps into adulthood and independence. Right now all I want to point out is that what Kors portrays as a unit with a common purpose—the professors of “oppression studies” and the parental administrative apparatus—looks from the other side like two distinct things that are more and more at odds, despite their common roots.

The distinction between the corporate interests of the university and the political and intellectual interests of its faculty is an important one. History professor Claire Potter (aka Tenured Radical) sums it up well—she clearly isn’t a fan of the university’s “‘rights free’ zone.”

Johnson may have been correct that Duke did not handle the lacrosse case well… but this was not a symptom of the university’s liberalism as an institution—quite the reverse, in fact. It is the flip side of a university governance process, almost ubiquitously shared among institutions of higher education, that more or less declares the campus a “rights-free” zone. This elimination of civil rights in university processes is neither a liberal nor a conservative issue: it is a question of whether the private sphere—whether that be Walmart or Harvard—can make its own rules to protect its own interests as an institution. The law says they can, and they do.

Potter’s analysis is emphatically borne out by Elliott Wolf’s “Dude, where’s my rights…” series in the Duke Chronicle (there are annotated versions of the articles on his home page). Wolf documents eight years of steady erosion in respect for due process in the Duke Judicial Code. It’s first-rate student journalism that picks up on an issue central to the lacrosse case but without getting mired in lacrosse-case tunnel vision. He sums up his findings in the Coupe de Grace (his term):

Since 1999, the Office of Judicial Affairs has watered down or eliminated
every major due process right afforded students facing adjudication; it has so broadened
its policies and procedures that almost any student could be summarily subjected to
judicial action for any reason; it has eliminated all representative student involvement in
making and enforcing undergraduate policy; and lastly, it has begun colluding with local
law enforcement in ways that arguably undermine students’ basic constitutional rights.

Wolf’s last piece for the Chronicle, a covert look at the Student Affairs-Industrial Complex, meshes nicely with Wiegman, Lubiano, and Hardt’s observations about the “student services sector.” The overall impression I get from Wolf’s coverage is that student affairs (judicial or otherwise) is its own little fiefdom, largely independent of the faculty.

Kors works himself up to a fever pitch with a string of rhetorical questions about the “almost insoluble problem of time” faced by professors intent on indoctrination: “How, in only four years, can they disabuse students of the notion that the capital, risk, productivity, and military sacrifice of others have contributed to human dignity and to the prospects of a decent society?” etc., etc. He follows that a couple of paragraphs later with the statement of purpose that, in his opinion, would constitute “truth in advertising” for the leftist “academic enterprises” that have a grip on higher education:

Let colleges and universities have the courage, if they truly believe what they say privately to themselves and to me, to put it on page one of their catalogues, fundraising letters, and appeals to the State assembly: “This University believes that your sons and daughters are the racist, sexist, homophobic, Eurocentric progeny or victims of an oppressive society from which most of them receive unjust privilege. In return for tuition and massive taxpayer subsidy, we shall assign rights on a compensatory basis and undertake by coercion their moral and political enlightenment.”

I’ve come across this idea before—near the end of one of the earliest comments I got on a lacrosse-case post, for instance:

Why should I increase my law practice dramatically to earn more income to support the salaries of faculty members who think the constitution does not apply to their students? I don’t like that it comes down to money but it is a consideration. I understand the faculty believes I have raised a racist and sexist child who desperately needs their education.

The person who wrote that is too articulate and thoughtful for me to dismiss, and I can see how someone who’s remote from university life could end up with the impression. It’s nutty stuff coming from a professor, though. Kors’ dire portrait goes far beyond reasonable concern about the cumulative effect of subtle, unconscious bias combined with the apparent willingness of a few professors to flirt with the line between education and indoctrination, and perhaps cross it. That may be a real problem, but in the context of the whole array of social and intellectual influences the students are navigating, it doesn’t justify the hyperbole. And if Kors is right about what an honest mission statement would look like, Duke is doing a miserable job of it.

It could be that I missed the memo laying out this brave new world of undergraduate education—I’ve never really been in the loop. But for what it’s worth, I’ll outline a few of the ways that Kors’ story clashes with my own experience. I’ve taught traditional music theory classes—thoroughly Eurocentric, if we have to use the word. I also taught Introduction to Jazz, a class that was cross-listed under AAAS. I’ve never imagined that I could arrange, much less coerce, any moral or political enlightenment from the students in my classes. I’m sure it would backfire if I tried, and I’d feel completely ridiculous in the process. If a student of mine has ever felt that they were being judged on some kind of political correctness it was either a misunderstanding or a failure on my part to live up to my professional commitments. I’ve never gotten an overt or covert message that I should teach to an approved ideology. In fact I’ve had closer to the opposite experience—in five semesters teaching Introduction to Jazz, which is a fairly large survey course, I never heard a thing from AAAS about what I should teach, or, for that matter, about anything else. From my experience if there’s a problem it’s the hands-off attitude, not pressure to conform.

As for as my own priorities, I can’t imagine wasting time and energy on indoctrination when I could be digging into the artistic and historical feast of, say, Louis Armstrong’s Dinah (check out the video!), Duke Ellington’s Black and Tan Fantasy, or Charlie Parker’s Ko-Ko, or guiding a class through the quasi-mathematical discipline of sixteenth-century counterpoint. I can’t imagine talking about Beethoven in order to dismiss him as a dead white male any more than I can imagine talking about the blues in order to trivialize it as salacious and primitive. I would hope to challenge students with either attitude to reconsider (last year I put up some thoughts about teaching classical music and the blues as well as a long post about my experience with Introduction to Jazz). I’ve never felt that I was out of step with my colleagues about any of this.

That’s just me, and I’m not denying that there’s a basis for Kors’ complaints. There’s no shortage of anti-Western sentiment in the humanities—some but not all of it is thoughtless and reflexive (it’s not too much for the edifice of Western civilization to bear, as far as I can tell). The clash of values has been heated in music departments—professors are great at turning big ideas and ideologies into a pretext for a turf war, so there’s been pettiness on both sides. But for many of us, if there’s a problem with today’s more inclusive concept of what music is worth studying, it’s that we’ve ended up with an embarrassment of riches.

Kors says, “I fight for intellectual pluralism, for legal equality, and for fairness simply because it is my duty to bear witness to the values I cherish, with no expectation of success.” It would be nice if he didn’t just bear witness but actually put those precious values into practice for the general public to see, instead of insulting them in order to fire up the anti-intellectual enemies of his enemy.

[O’Connor has now responded to this post, or at least complained about it. Her counterargument, if you can call it that, boils down to the observation that Kors is the kind of person that sensible people believe and all I’ve done is throw sour grapes at him. Natually I had to write a followup, too.]

The comment of mine that wasn’t cleared on was rejected by the spam filter on Critical Mass:

DeLater’s impression of present-day academia, even more than Kors’, seems like a comic-book version of reality as I see it. It’s great for nursing grudges and fruitless to argue with.

I read all of Kors’ article after posting my comment. The earlier part, which I liked, is a description of an intellectual climate in which professors fostered intellectualism over ideology and valued independent thought on the part of their students, even encouraged students to follow lines of reasoning that challenged their professor’s political convictions. So it seems that his ideal for the university is very close to mine. I was thinking about that kind of intellectual openness when I commented (tongue in cheek, more or less) about my own relativism.

It’s exactly those values that I can’t reconcile with Johnson’s criticism. His argument is often circular and serious challenges are studiously avoided. And it thrives on false choices like the one implicit in TG’s challenge—to criticize it is not necessarily to make a “pro-Duke 88 argument.” This comment thread isn’t the place to spell the issues out in detail. If you’re interested in the basis for my opinion, go here. But don’t bother if you’ve got the controversy neatly packaged up and you want to keep it that way.

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.

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.

The sense is a blog entry by University of Texas law professor Brian Leiter taking KC Johnson to task for his lacrosse-case coverage. In Leiter’s opinion “KC Johnson doesn’t read too well, and like most misreaders with an agenda, he misreads with a vengeance.” The two key texts for which Leiter disputes Johnson’s readings are the “listening” ad—Leiter has the chutzpah to argue that the ad’s endorsers actually know their own minds when they claim that the ad does not judge the lacrosse players guilty—and Wahneema Lubiano’s email soliciting signatures, in which, he argues, her mention that the ad is “about the lacrosse team incident” can’t be read as a statement of purpose that overrides what’s said in the ad itself.

I particularly appreciate his concluding paragraph:

Neither lawyers nor one expects historians would ordinarily credit such tortured interpretive practices as those Professor Johnson brings to bear in order to smear a “group” of faculty. That he overreached in this regard is all the more regrettable since it is clear that there were some individual faculty who made comments (that have no resonance with the ad) that were, at best, intemperate and, at worst, grossly irresponsible.

The “Group of 88” is not a help but a hindrance to anyone who wants to understand what went wrong at Duke in spring 2006.

The nonsense is an article by Azhar Majeed entitled “More Shameful Behavior at Duke University” in the webzine of an organization called the FIRE (“Foundation for Individual Rights in Education”). The only thing that might pass as news in Majeed’s article is that someone quoted FIRE co-founder Harvey Silverglate in another article about a well known flare-up in the lacrosse controversy—the column written by Duke professor Steven Baldwin for the Duke Chronicle in late October 06. According to KC Johnson, with this column Baldwin became “the first member of the arts and sciences faculty to publicly criticize the ‘despicable’ rush-to-judgment denunciations of his colleagues.” I’m happy to grant that it was past time for faculty members to speak publicly and critically about the treatment of the lacrosse players on campus and by Nifong. I’m hard pressed to think of a way of making the point that’s more obnoxious and less constructive than Baldwin’s, though.

Majeed follows Johnson closely, describing Baldwin as “a rare voice of reason among the school’s faculty” who “courageously wrote [the] op-ed.” Based on his second paragraph, Majeed might do well writing for The Onion:

Tellingly, yet another shameful episode came out of Professor Baldwin’s efforts. Towards the end of his op-ed, he had written that the aforementioned faculty members deserved to be tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail. Somehow, this created a controversy.

What Baldwin actually said is that “[t]hey should be tarred and feathered, ridden out of town on a rail and removed from the academy. Their comments were despicable.”

Amazing that would create a controversy, isn’t it? Robin Weigman, Director of Women’s Studies at Duke, wrote a short, well-modulated letter to the paper in response. In it she does say that “[b]eing tarred and feathered is the language of lynching,” and that’s the line that got the bulk of the attention. In the usual blot-out-the-forest-with-a-tree response, The Johnsville News pointed out that it’s not really the language of lynching, but so what? It’s still the language of intolerance and vigilantism, directed indiscriminately at an unspecified group of colleagues who didn’t live up to the paternalistic standard Baldwin set for himself and the university.

Baldwin ended up issuing an apology, about which Harvey Silverglate says

it is unbearably sad that 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.

“Tarred and feathered” and “ridden out of town on a rail” are common enough metaphors, but strung together with “removed from the academy” they become the hyperbolic flourish on a very concrete suggestion. In a tit-for-tat that strikes me as unwarranted, some of the faculty targeted wrote to Brodhead asking that Baldwin be fired. I’m sure there were barbs flying back and forth that aren’t in the public record, and some may have smacked of reflexive political correctness. But considering the tone of the statement she was responding to, I don’t see how Weigman’s letter can be dismissed in those terms.

I don’t know what to make of FIRE, which has on its board of advisers people like Nat Hentoff and Wendy Kaminer, and claims what should be a non-partisan mission: “to defend and sustain individual rights at America’s colleges and universities… [including] freedom of speech, legal equality, due process, religious liberty, and sanctity of conscience.” To say they’ve uncritically accepted Johnson and Taylor’s version of the lacrosse case is an understatement—in their review of Until Proven Innocent they say that “Duke President Richard Brodhead and his goons made a habit of pandering to hostile faculty members and demonizing the accused students….”

Goons? Perfectly apt metaphor? Unbearably sad? FIRE may be serious about free speech, but with respect to the lacrosse case they seem to feel no obligation to either hear or respect the perspective of a substantial part of the Duke community.

Until now I hadn’t registered Johnson’s description of Baldwin as “the first of the nearly 500 members of Duke’s arts and sciences faculty to stand up publicly and testify to my profession’s best qualities.” This may shed some light on what Johnson meant when he claimed in DIW to be defending the ideals of his profession. As far as I know Baldwin is a fine teacher who gets excellent results by “[regarding his] students in much the same way [he regards his] children.” I’m confident that I can fulfill my professional obligations by treating my students as young adults in search of an education, responsible to themselves and not to me for their behavior. And however much the lacrosse team deserved support, I don’t believe that Baldwin’s hectoring and paternalistic op-ed represented anything like his profession’s best qualities.

Tenured Radical (aka Professor Claire Potter) has been kicking the hornets nest again with two posts about Johnson. In the first, she takes issue with his spin on a recent faculty job search in History at the University of Iowa. The second is her exemplary response to the suggestion her colleague Ralph Luker registered in the comment thread that she was baiting Johnson, and a subsequent comment that was dismissive of Luker in rather personal terms. I continue to be impressed by the reflective quality of her blog, not to mention the intelligence and sense of humor. What follows is an edited version of the comment I left on the second post (I see there’s a third on the same theme today, but I haven’t had a chance to read it yet).

I appreciate not only Potter’s clear description of the context of Duke’s “perfect storm” but also her frank acknowledgment of the human element—friendship, loyalty, and identification—in the reactions to such controversies. One of the worst aspects of Johnson’s scorched-earth criticism of Duke is his lack of interest in or sensitivity to the human element unless it can be reduced to something useful—sinister on one side, sympathetic on the other. The point has been brought home to me when I’ve heard from people who were on the scene. Even those who disagree with my harsh criticism of DIW have done a better job than Johnson at putting the over-the-top vehemence of some of the reactions at Duke into a human context.

It’s easy to point out Johnson’s flaws but harder to come up with a constructive reaction that goes beyond that. Watching the direction of the comment thread on the first post, I was tempted to chime in and reinforce an important point Potter made in passing, contrasting Johnson’s “manic resentment” with “the focused, constructive critique our profession undoubtedly deserves and should encourage.” In the same vein her post today suggests that “if, in the instance of the lacrosse case, the response was inappropriate to the actual circumstances, if students were unfairly stigmatized in classrooms, that should have been the object of civilized critique as well.” It’s too easy to just circle the wagons in the face of Johnson’s relentless attacks, and as I’ve been picking over the bones of the Duke scandal I’ve ended up with the impression that too many real issues were reactively and defensively ceded to his side. Where were the voices of constructive, civilized critique when we needed them?

[I’ve now read Potter’s third post and it’s the best yet—highly recommended.]