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{ Tag Archives } Tim Tyson

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 […]

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

Duke’s perfect storm–too much bullshit, too few bullshit detectors

The discourse in and around the lacrosse case is full of misrepresentation, manipulation, disembling and distortion. Thanks to commenter RRH and philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt, I realize that a great deal of it can be described more accurately as bullshit. The word really captures the spirit of KC Johnson’s anti-academic crusade, but he’s not by any stretch the only offender. Prosecutor Mike Nifong and his minions generated loads of it, and the faculty at Duke contributed more than their fair share, too. What was needed was more bullshit detectors and fewer producers.

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2008 08 04 Duke Lacrosse Case
Duke University
Teaching Comments (59)

Professors debating badly

A few weeks ago I wrote about Tim Tyson’s answers to a reporter’s questions about the lacrosse case, and about KC Johnson’s response (the interview with Tyson, originally on a News & Observer blog, made it into print a few days later). Among other things I was disappointed that Tyson wasn’t willing to think more […]

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2008 06 16 Duke Lacrosse Case
Duke University Comments (7)

There can be only one story

It’s interesting to see how bits of news reverberate through the blogosphere. Thanks to some saved searches in my Google reader, I’ve seen a number of lacrosse-case stories make the rounds. The bigger ones have generated some lasting buzz—the motion from Duke’s side to shut down the Duke Lawsuit website, the surreal news the accuser, […]

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2008 05 27 Duke Lacrosse Case
Duke University Comments (6)