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The commonplace campus radical and the cure that’s worse than the disease

There’s a simple question behind the things I’ve written over the past six months or so about the intersection between the Duke lacrosse case and the conservative critique of higher education. How can anyone who’s worried about the academic world’s low intellectual standards, who’s pushing to raise those standards, even, how can they not only […]

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2008 12 19 Academia
Duke Lacrosse Case Comments (0)

The trouble with tribalism

The word of the day is “tribalism.” I’ve spent quite a bit of time in Kenya, where there’s no way to avoid the word—certainly not after the post-election violence at the beginning of this year. In a New York Times op-ed a few months ago, Roger Cohen takes the idea of tribalism on a whirlwind […]

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2008 06 11 Academia
Duke Lacrosse Case
Duke University Comments (7)

Alan Kors and the unbearable sadness of educating

It’s a culture-war commonplace that the Left has dumbed-down higher education with its namby-pamby political correctness, hostility to the Western canon, race- and gender-obsessed pseudo-scholarship, etc. What I’m finding, though, is that nothing dumbs down a professor like the culture war. Exhibit A is KC Johnson’s Durham-in-Wonderland (DIW), where a facade of PhD-quality analysis masks […]

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2008 05 20 Academia
Duke Lacrosse Case
Duke University
Teaching Comments (6)

What is The Truth about KC Johnson?

I’ve already written twice about this episode of the Duke lacrosse scandal. Check the first of those posts for details. I touched on it again to make some points about people jumping to conclusions in a heated controversy that’s bound to have some nastiness on both sides. But there was an important piece of the […]

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2008 04 07 Duke Lacrosse Case
Duke University Comments (12)

KC Johnson and the extremist factory

After a very long break, I’m picking up where I left off in my analysis of the Duke lacrosse case, still concentrating on the role Durham-in-Wonderland (DIW) played in framing and setting the tone of the debate about academic culture at Duke. This time I’m turning from KC Johnson’s criticism of the Duke faculty who […]

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2008 03 28 Duke Lacrosse Case
Duke University Comments (0)

Sense and nonsense from the legal department

In the last couple of days I came across this odd juxtaposition of legal perspectives that speak to KC Johnson’s treatment of the lacrosse case. The sense is a blog entry by University of Texas law professor Brian Leiter taking KC Johnson to task for his lacrosse-case coverage. In Leiter’s opinion “KC Johnson doesn’t read […]

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2007 12 20 Duke Lacrosse Case
Duke University Comments (16)