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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

In his few paragraphs of commentary Lindgren reinforces Johnson’s complaint about “unsourced ramblings”—claims made by Wiegman, Lubiano, and Hardt without a citation, especially the ones about vile messages they received. Lindgren is a little more upfront that Johnson about drawing the conclusion that these claims are misleading at best. Johnson, who has a bad habit of falling back on insinuation in place of direct statements he might have to defend, says that “it doesn’t take a Ph.D. to figure out why” there are no citations for “any of these outlandish claims.” I agree that the article alludes to a body of discourse—blogs and other web pages, email, phone messages, and perhaps other mass media—that should at least be described and enumerated more precisely. But scroll down into the comment thread from most any “Group of 88” post on DIW and there’s a generous dose of knee-jerk bile. The urge to denounce, demean, and vilify comes through loud and clear, and also the urge to punish, which is the essence of what the Duke authors call “faux juridicalism.” What difference does it make for that overall picture whether they’ve actually been accused of tax evasion or “typically” been told to get back to the slave quarters?

Lindgren also wonders “whether their complaints about blogs aren’t mostly about commenters to the blogs, rather than the posts of actual bloggers.” The Social Text article is about “the ways in which the contemporary U.S. university has become a target of conservative agendas.” The authors look to “blogs” for a sample of sentiments that are widely shared and so should come through in both posts and comments. A law professor is surely able to wrap his head around the overall line of reasoning and come up with something meaningful to say about, for instance, the authors’ concept of juridical attacks. If that’s too much to expect he should at least be able to find some more significant points to nitpick.

I can see why Lindgren would want to insist on a sharp distinction between blogger and commenter after reading the comments on his post. Some are innocuous enough, and a few are clever and insightful, but for the most part it’s a collection of rhetorical snorts and guffaws—a chummy little festival of ignorance. Nobody’s as self-righteously sure of themselves as the person who has no idea what they don’t know and no interest in finding out. But what self-respecting group of law professors of any political stripe would want to feed and house such a small-minded, anti-intellectual moblet?

The prime example comes from one “Javert”:

Unless one has lived under censorship, it is hard to grasp the chill factor that the G88 created among the students and few faculty who disagreed with them.

I’ll go out on a limb and guess that he wasn’t on campus to experience this chill, or anything else. Could be he’s lived under censorship—you never know. Compare Javert’s fantasy to the comment from Asher.

I go to Duke and was around during the whole flap, and I have to say that, while the signatories of this ad acted in a horribly unprofessional manner…, their sentiments weren’t so far from the student body’s. I never thought the story made much sense, but very few people I knew agreed with me.

It doesn’t sound like he was caught in the grip of a Stalinesque chill. Of course I can’t verify that Asher is actually a Duke student or, for that matter, that Javert isn’t. But I do know that the women’s lacrosse players were students and Nick was a student, that Michael Gustafson is on the faculty and so is the unnamed senior professor I corresponded a little with. All of them disagreed with the “G88” and managed to express their opinion without any serious repercussions.

It’s a pattern I’ve noted before and will likely note again, since I think it’s important. There’s a sense of proportion to the comments and criticisms that come from people who were on campus as the case unfolded, even those who are angry, disappointed, or disgusted that so much of the community turned on the lacrosse team. It seems to me that that sense of proportion is woefully lacking in the average blog hooligan.

[I’ve just noticed a post by Brian Leiter that points to a debate between law professors Eugene Volokh and Cass Sunstein about who’s responsible for the comments on a blog. Leiter also links to an older post about Volokh inciting a kind of comment-thread proxy war on him.]

Anti-intellectualism seems to have a pretty secure home in the American university these days. Washington University in St. Louis has decided to welcome it in broad daylight by handing an honorary degree to hateful paranoid reactionary Phyllis Schlafly. Brian Leiter’s theory is that Washington University is deeply beholden to right-wing donors. Over at Crooked Timber, Kathy G suspects that

[although] at least a few of the board and committee members who voted to honor her are conservatives, I’m willing to bet that the overwhelming majority are not exactly McCain supporters. I’d guess that most of them are liberals of one sort or another, and I suspect the decision to honor Schlafly came out of a misguided attempt to be “fair.” It’s a distressing fact that many liberals, anxious not to be seen as “biased” or as condescending to conservatives, in fact bend over backwards to be “fair and balanced” towards them. Such behavior then allows them to congratulate themselves on their “tolerance” and “open-mindedness.” Though, to be “fair,” so to speak—such behavior does come out of a genuinely decent liberal instinct to be evenhanded.

But this way madness lies. Because, as much as conservatives may whine and scream to the contrary, liberalism and conservatism are not moral equivalents. Because, on the one side you have the thinkers and activists who have advanced freedom, social justice, and human rights, and on the other, you have those who have attempted to thwart all those things. King George III is not the moral equivalent of George Washington. Jefferson Davis is not the moral equivalent of Abraham Lincoln. Joe McCarthy is not the moral equivalent of Walter Reuther. George Wallace is not the moral equivalent of Martin Luther King. And Phyllis Schlafly is not the moral equivalent of Betty Friedan.

So if you’re going to be handing out honorary degrees to political activists, conservatives are always going to come up short. And that is how it should be.

Them’s fightin’ words, and the stage was set for a comment war, liberal v. conservative. I like a good argument as much as anyone else, and this kind can be fun if you’re involved. It’s more of a contact sport than a search for truth, though, and often not so illuminating for the bystanders.

The lacrosse case surfaced as a toss-off from Michael Bérubé:

71. Dan Simon @ 8:

So can we finally end this charade about conservatives being treated as full equals in academia, and being massively underrepresented simply because they’re less interested in intellectual pursuits, or perhaps less intellectually capable than those on the left?

Yes we can. Phyllis Schlafly’s degree should finally bring a definitive end to this charade. Also, Larry Summers and Duke lacrosse team Ward Churchill.

The sarcasm and the reference to conservative hot-buttons was clear enough, but I’m not sure I’d have quite cracked the code on my own. Fortunately Bérubé explained. He was pointing up the way these cases get pulled out of context, blown out of proportion, and treated as representative and generic. For instance, Kathy’s strongly-worded opinion about what sort of political activists should get honorary degrees is transformed by Savage into a revelation about a massive “charade” perpetrated by liberals against all conservative academics.

It seems to me that, especially with her list of diametrical political figures—Jefferson Davis vs. Lincoln, George Wallace vs. MLK, etc.—Kathy invited that kind of escalation. But the Duke case does work well as a shorthand for an incident or controversy that’s hyped to death, its significance inflated by reducing the actors to ideological mannequins (or perfect victims and perfect offenders). Eventually Bérubé takes a jab at the bubble and at the chief academic purveyor of hot air to fill it.

I can’t believe someone would suggest that I am unaware of these players’ innocence. Good lord! The Duke Lacrosse Case is the single most important civil-liberties issue of our time! Is there man, woman, or child alive who does not know of the ordeal these young men have suffered, the inconceivable torture they endured? These people were voiceless, invisible, convicted with no possibility of appeal, not even granted the right to legal representation—until KC Johnson came along, heroically, to suggest that a suspiciously high number of the Gang of 88 had published books with the Duke University Press. And then, at last, justice was done in America.

That works for me as satire, and it’s about as much as you can expect when a fading scandal is being kicked around peripherally in a blog comment thread. Plus it’s nice to see the expression “Gang of 88” pop up in a context that makes it clear what empty-headed scaremongering it is. But until I see more discussion from the Left of the definitive contributions to the fiasco that came from people on their side of the political spectrum, I’ll wince a little at purely partisan impressions of the case.

I’m also wary of staking out the moral high ground for leftists, liberals, progressives or any other political denomination, even in the limited way Kathy does. When it comes to basic human attributes—things like intelligence, fairness, empathy, mental flexibility, generosity, vindictiveness and tolerance for dissent—I think people all across the political spectrum are pretty much the same. With respect to the lacrosse case, there’s a great deal of symmetry between the opposing camps, and unfortunately it’s most obvious with the negatives—irrationality, vindictiveness, and intolerance, not empathy and generosity. I have a feeling that non-ideological traits like those, as much or more than political conviction, determine the moral quality of political debates and acts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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