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KC Johnson vs. the commonplace campus radical–One good rush to judgment deserves another

In this post and the one before I’m looking at a couple of recent episodes in KC Johnson’s ongoing crusade against left-wing extremists in academia. Last time I wrote about his attempt to pursue two narrow agendas at once. One, the academic-culture crusade, he pursues with the usual rhetoric and agenda-driven reasoning while the other one is pursued with wishful thinking—that’s the only way the two can be reconciled. In the legal controversy I’m looking at this time, the extremists have taken the side of a young man accused of a crime, and they’re the ones making noises about a heavy-handed prosecution that’s undermining the chances of a fair trial—there’s a lot of overlap with the role Johnson played in the Duke lacrosse scandal. In order to use the controversy against them, he has to approach the justice issues with a different attitude. Among other things, he casually lays out the unproven allegations as if they were proven facts, despite two and a half years of castigating anyone whose statements about the Duke lacrosse team seemed to presume guilt.

Back in August Johnson posted his thoughts about “The Unusual Hashmi Case”. A 2003 graduate of Brooklyn College, where Johnson is on the faculty, Syed Fahad Hashmi is being held on charges of providing material assistance to Al Queda. But the focus of the post isn’t Hashmi’s situation, it’s the efforts of two of his former instructors to protest the conditions of his detention, pursued under the banner Educators for Civil Liberties. It’s too bad that people who organize these fights against injustice are drawn to expansive names like that. The Organization for Truth and Fairness from the lacrosse case is a classic of the genre. Hashmi’s supporters weren’t that grandiose, but one case, no matter how serious, is not a surrogate for the whole realm of civil liberties.

A petition is central to the effort, and I have to admit I cringe at the thought of another statement of concern making the faculty rounds—the Support Bill Ayers petition I mentioned in the last post shows how strong the bandwagon effect can be with those things. The one for Hashmi is quite a bit more focussed and substantive, though. The main issue is the special administrative measures dictating that he’s to be held in solitary confinement and severely restricting his communication with anyone, including his attorney. The petitioners believe these measures are excessive and unnecessary and should be lifted.

Johnson has nothing good to say about the undertaking, but he’s particularly hard on “[the] commentary about the case’s possible effects on free speech and the academy” from Hashmi’s former instructors. I don’t have the background to fully judge the legal issues, but it seems to me that Johnson’s most convincing point is about how constitutionally protected speech and associations are valid evidence of a defendant’s “state of mind.” And in general the petitioners’ claims are more speculative and probably weaker as they turn from Hashmi’s plight to the chilling effects of the case on activists or in the classroom. According to Johnson, this amounts to “cross[ing] over from one-sided to merely bizarre.” That’s overstating the problem quite a bit. In fact, it strikes me as a better characterization of Johnson’s attack on the petitioners.

The first version of Johnson’s post is as one-sided as anything Hashmi’s supporters produced, and it’s no credit to Cliopatria, the high-minded blog for academic historians where it was posted. Continue reading ›

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2008 11 29 Academia
Duke Lacrosse Case
Duke University Comments (4) Permalink

KC Johnson vs. the commonplace campus radical–Mr. Obama’s neighborhood

Until a couple of weeks ago we were supposed to be stocking up on information for “Decision 2008” (a lot of the best stuff seemed to be on “Indecision 2008”, though). According to columnist William Kristol, Sarah Palin was doing her part, “helping the American people understand ‘who the real Barack Obama is’” by raising questions about Bill Ayers, former Weatherman and current Distinguished Professor of Education. A week before the election, she and John McCain were working hard to secure the release of a video held hostage by the LA Times—stuff the American people needed to know about Ayers and “yet another radical professor from the neighborhood,” Rashid Khalidi. It was a great service to voters who needed to figure out who to be more afraid of before they could make up their mind.

If you google obama ayers khalidi, what comes up is mostly the ranting of people already certain about who to be more afraid of. It was in the interest of the Republican side to make the most of the two professors’ radicalism and their ties to Obama, and anyway, radical professors are a favorite specter of the Right. The academic world’s reflex to circle the wagons and shout “McCarthyism” is represented by the fulsome petition at supportbillayers.org, and the list of over 4000 names under it. But not all Obama supporters were sympathetic to Ayers and Khalidi, and the first line of defense from his camp was to downplay the connection.

I noticed one person conspicuously trying to play on both sides of the fence, to make the most of the radicalism but downplay the connection—KC Johnson. Inside Higher Ed tags him as someone who’s “frequently criticized academe for a lack of political diversity” when he’s dragged in for balance in an otherwise soft-headed article “In Defense of Ayers”. In fact he approached the controversy about Obama’s radical pals the same way he’s approached the Duke lacrosse case, not as a critic but as a crusader rooting out the extremists of the academic Left. As I’ve pointed out ad nauseum about his lacrosse-case stuff, his crusading mentality reduces people and issues to cartoonish black-and-white, and his reasoning, evidence, and rhetoric are all compromised. His defense of Obama shows how in the grip of it he is, because it’s not really a defense, it’s an attempt to capitalize on the controversy in order to promote the academic culture war as a Democratic party agenda.

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2008 11 20 Academia
Duke Lacrosse Case
Politics Comments (6) Permalink

I’ve looked at change from both sides now

The first time I voted was 1980, when Reagan knocked Carter out of a second term. I don’t even remember how I got my news back then, but I do remember that everyone was very grim around Reed College, where the unofficial motto was “Communism - Atheism - Free Love” and the hard-core set walked around with bare feet all winter and ate what they could scrounge off the bussed trays in the cafeteria. When I started at Reed a substantial part of my financial aid was in the form of federal need-based grants. I think those were pretty much gone by the time I graduated.

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

Chicago—Hyde Park, in fact—was a huge change. Continue reading ›

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2008 11 05 Politics Comments (2) Permalink

Postmodern conservative triumphalism rulz!

Kevin Mattson says that his new book, Rebels All! A Short History of the Conservative Mind in Postwar America, ends with a look at

…the rise of what I call “postmodern conservatism”—how an almost poststructuralist embrace of diversity and criticism of universal values informs the wars against “objectivity” and the mainstream media, the dominance of evolution and the call to teach intelligent design (ID) in public schools, and David Horowitz’s struggle for a student bill of rights in higher education.

The idea of “intellectual diversity” is a classic of postmodern conservatism (for those who don’t like their conservatism quite so postmodernized, it’s “intellectual pluralism”). It’s a slippery concept that’s inspired plenty of heated and arcane debates—to get a feel for them, go Fish. Based on what I’ve seen—a fairly haphazard sample—“intellectual diversity” is mostly used as a pretentious euphemism for “political diversity,” something that’s a lot like cultural diversity. If smart, educated, and decent people can come from a wide range of races and cultures, then it seems reasonable to say they can come from the different political persuasions as well. I’m not sure how many people really believe that, in their heart of hearts, and the relativism is sure ironic coming from the conservative side. But there’s some merit in the idea, I think. Cloistered orthodoxy and petty intolerance are endemic to academia, and the tendencies are only encouraged by too much homogeneity. A while back I pointed out a couple of professors whose contributions are tied to the way they stand out as conservatives against a background that’s largely liberal.

Positive examples are especially illuminating because intellectual diversity is usually promoted by highlighting the negatives its supposed to fix—the outrages of liberal bias and political correctness. In fact, it seems to me that one of the better arguments against intellectual diversity as a reform agenda is the poor quality of the polemics launched by some of its promoters and fans. Continue reading ›

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2008 10 31 Academia
Politics Comments (0) Permalink

The joy of not knowing very much

A few posts ago, a reader suggested that I’d “squeezed all the available juice out of DIW” (KC Johnson’s blog Durham-in-Wonderland, that is) and I might find some fresh material on David Thompson’s blog. The first thing I read over there was on an old familiar theme—liberal academics and their uncontrollable urge to indoctrinate. Not only does it pull two lefty-professor quotes from an editorial Johnson wrote in 2005, it uses them in the same mindless way. It’s KC lite—tastes a little better, but still unfulfilling.

Thompson writes as if he knows about higher education and he’s building a case against its liberal elements. Like anyone who’s been to school and can read a paper, he knows something about it. The problem is that his case depends as much on not knowing things as it does on knowing them. It’s a problem for me, I should say—I may be coming at it with the wrong standard. If the blog is meant as nothing more than entertainment with a political slant, then I guess he has a pretty good formula. The post I’m looking at probably wrote itself once he had the quotes, and like-minded readers get a nice little buzz off the righteous indignation. To have that impact there has to be an appearance of reasoning. A lot of actual reasoning with real-life complexities and ambiguities would be counterproductive, though—more effort for less effect. Thompson’s not an academic decision-maker, so I suppose he might as well write whatever he wants. Still, his criticism is supposed to sound smart but it makes a virtue of ignorance, and that really bugs me.

The theme of the post is “classroom political advocacy.” Thompson starts by invoking a scene from the documentary Indoctrinate U. about a professor who faced “a campaign of harassment by left-leaning colleagues.” That sounds like a matter of professional intolerance, not classroom advocacy, but it makes the point that bad things are happening to good people in the halls of learning. Cut to “[a] recent post on classroom advocacy at Crooked Timber, a site popular among left-leaning academics….” Thompson picks out three passages from the comments, arranged from ridiculous to reasonable. The first is from a person who thinks the world as we know it will end if McCain is elected, and since the other side doesn’t play fair why should his side? The comment starts with a disclaimer: “I’m not an academic nor a purist.” But never mind that—the site is still popular with left-leaning academics. And that’s the basic strategy: Pick up statements from here and there, brush off the reservations and qualifications and clarifications, then post them under a banner that says “leftist academic.”

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2008 10 30 Academia
Politics
Teaching Comments (0) Permalink

Run-of-the-mill stupidity

A few months ago I posted about the reactions when a Duke philosophy professor, interviewed in the campus paper, invoked a John Stuart Mill quote about stupidity and conservatives in order to explain the relative lack of conservative academics. More and more surfers have been finding that post with searches like this:

  • js mill conservatives stupid critique
  • john stuart mill quote conservative stupid
  • john stuart mill i didn’t mean to say that conservatives are stupid people
  • i did not intend to suggest that all conservative people are stupid but i did intend to suggest that all stupid people are conservative.

There’s another cluster that doesn’t seem to be as historically informed:

  • stupid conservatives
  • why are conservatives stupid?
  • conservatives are stupid jokes
  • stupid things conservatives say
  • every stupid person i know is a conservative

Like Obama said to Letterman, it’s silly season in American politics—it seems like we’re really outdoing ourselves this time. I’m guessing that’s the spirit behind most of those searches (I’m not sure what the spirit behind the search on “lawn guys are stupid” was, though). Nothing spreads election-season cheer like a discussion of the innate stupidity of the other side, especially when the theory is endorsed by a certified Great Thinker.

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2008 10 14 Duke Lacrosse Case
Politics Comments (9) Permalink

Some bad satire, some good sense

About a week ago, Google dug up an odd little bit of satire in an Onion knock-off called Carbolic Smoke Ball. [The text is gone now—all that’s left is a picture of a goofy quarter.]


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

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

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

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

Snore.

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

My theory at the moment, though, is that satire has to be in the realm of plausible to be funny—believable except for the twist, or something like that. This one is not in the realm. Continue reading ›

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2008 09 27 Duke Lacrosse Case
Duke University Comments (11) Permalink

The crusade announcer

I know I’m supposed to be putting up some kind of “wrap-up” post, but somehow it’s just not happening. In the mean time, stuff like this comes up, so why hold back?

Duke’s African and African American Studies Department is getting a new chairman from Harvard—the devil incarnate, er, I mean, J. Lorand Matory. According to KC Johnson, who should know, since it’s his alma mater, “Matory’s damage to Harvard was incalculable.” The “was” is premature, though—he’s got about half a year to put the finishing touches on his project up there, and then he’ll transfer the effort to our lil’ ol’ backwater down south. Matory is clearly a controversial figure, and I don’t mean to suggest that Johnson’s complaints and concerns are groundless. But he’s been crying wolf for two and a half years now—it’s not very motivating.

Matory is the main subject of the latest post on Durham-in-Wonderland (DIW), but after railing about him for a while Johnson turns to an old favorite, a past chair of AAAS, in fact—Karla Holloway. Her latest transgression is “propos[ing] a ‘diversity’ crusade targeting units of the university whose ‘diversity’ performance the 88'er deems insufficient.” It’s in the latest Chronicle of Higher Education, and since the article isn’t freely available I’ve appended the section about Duke to the end of my post. [A reader pointed out that in fact it is freely available.]

In the comments on DIW, someone has taken Johnson to task for framing Holloway’s remarks as a “crusade.” The two had a funny little exchange, totally at cross-purposes. It’s so much like the ones I’ve been part of that someone else speculates that the annoying questioner is actually “the reharmonizer man parsing words again in order to try to cover for his 88 friends.” Now I don’t know about the 88 friends. I’m here at the computer all day and half the night, typing away, and do they ever find the time to call, or even email a line or two? Of course not. But it is true that I get all fussy about words, and it’s nice to see that there’s at least one other person with the same problem. (Maybe what Ralph, my most diligent commenter, has been trying to do all this time is teach me how to read DIW. If so, the secret is to just accept that Johnson is absolutely right about the important issues and then go with your gut instincts. All the words have to do is move you in the right general direction.)

Anyone who’s paying attention should be able to see that the anonymous questioner in this case is briefer than I’ve ever managed to be, and also a bit more guarded. In fact, the back-and-forth makes more sense if one side is expanded and the other is compressed, with some artistic license taken to bring out the essence. Then it goes something like this: Continue reading ›

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2008 09 25 Duke Lacrosse Case
Duke University Comments (5) Permalink

The devils in the details

It’s time for me to stop the endless picking apart of KC Johnson’s blog, Durham-in-Wonderland (DIW). In fact it was probably time a few months ago. I’ll never reach the level of the poor sap who’s spent years defaming Brian Leiter, but I might end up on par with the one who got a bad review from Richard Brodhead years ago and is now relishing an endless scholarly vendetta. I’ve got a wrap-up post mostly written, but first there are a few loose ends to deal with. In addition to the case-by-case fudging that I sampled in the last post, there are two fairly constant factors that help to make the Wonderland narrative such an uninformative but judgmental thing. One is the regular rhetorical nudges Johnson uses to get his readers to see things his way. The other is his uncritical reliance on secondhand information.

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2008 09 07 Duke Lacrosse Case
Duke University Comments (18) Permalink

One pile after another: building a bullshit Wonderland

In the middle of my last post I promised a list of some of the bullshit I’ve come across in Durham-in-Wonderland (DIW). It’s only, what? three weeks later? not quite a month? Anyway, here it is, a collection that lends credence to Harry G. Frankfurt’s comment that the “normal habit of attending to the way things are may become attenuated or lost” because of “excessive indulgence in [bullshitting], which involves making assertions without paying attention to anything except what it suits one to say.” What it suits KC Johnson to say is whatever feeds his Wonderland narrative—the cast, action, and bitter irony that it keeps it churning along. That’s how it seems to work in his coverage of academic issues and of Duke, anyway, and that’s the focus in all my posts about DIW.

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.

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2008 08 28 Duke Lacrosse Case
Duke University Comments (20) Permalink