On K.C. Johnson's Durham in Wonderland and Until Proven Innocent

(The second installment can be read here.)

With all due apologies to Ralph, Scott, Timothy, Miriam, and the rest of the good folk at Cliopatria, I've got to say: keeping K.C. Johnson on the roster does the rest of the contributors a disservice.  He divined the truth of what happened in Durham on the night of March 13th long before the police announced the results of their investigation.  He was correct.  Those who believed three Duke lacrosse players had raped an African-American women were incorrect.

Granted.

But I spent an hour this afternoon catching up with Johnson's Durham-in-Wonderland.  If the research presented on the blog is indicative of the content of his soon-to-be-published book—Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case—then I can only conclude that the book'll be positively Horowitzian in tenor and substance.

Like Horowitz—and clocks twice a day—Johnson occasionally nails his target.  Consider his series of profiles of the "Group of 88."  That Wahneema Lubiano is a tenured associate professor in the Program in Literature with one edited volume on her CV and two monograph that've been perpetually forthcoming since 1997 infuriates me.  It also infuriates every academic struggling for tenure, so the notion that her position is indicative of a general rot in the academic humanities is willfully misleading.

One down, eighty-seven to go.  Only he's not going to get to all eighty-seven.  He's shutting down the blog when Until Proven Innocent's published in September, and as of August 30th had only written fourteen—and even that's being charitable, since the final three were group profiles.  I can imagine the response: "So what?  He's found fourteen intellectual frauds in a group of only eighty-eight professors!  That's a damning percentage."

It certainly is.  Were he a baseball player, he'd be hitting a Ruthian .159.  But he isn't even hitting that well.  Consider his profile of Joseph Harris, the director of Duke's University Writing Program.  He's published three books and numerous articles.  His articles are published in the most important journals in the field of composition studies.  He has what can only be described as a stellar publication record for someone working in composition and rhetoric.

Johnson's dismissive description of the books—"each of which discuss how to teach writing"—is a blatant attempt to minimize the work of the entire field.  (A field, I should add, whose lack of respect is often lamented by conservative critics when they bemoan the reading and writing skills of the contemporary college student.)  What really galls me about Johnson's profile of Harris is his attempt to mislead his readers into believing statements like the following point to the liberal bias of Duke composition classes:

In a 1991 essay, he asserted that composition classes should "teach students to write as critics of their culture," with "teaching itself as a form of cultural criticism, about classrooms that do not simply reproduce the values of our universities and cultures but that also work to resist and question them."

That's about as benign a description of a course devoted to critical thinking as you'll ever find.  But if you conflate "criticism" with "condemnation," as Johnson invites you to, then it seems as if the University Writing Program's a haven for anti-American indoctrination.  To wit:

In another 1991 essay, he opposed using English classes as an opportunity to "pass down and preserve the legacy of high [W]estern culture." Why? Because students "need to use language to question the demands their society makes upon them." 

The first thing to note is that Harris published two articles in 1991.  The second is that Johnson capitalized the "w" in the phrase "high western culture."  The third is that what Harris says here is supremely uncontroversial.  He wants students to develop the ability to think for themselves in a language not borrowed unthinkingly from their parents.  This is not indoctrination: it's teaching.  He doesn't advocate teaching students to draw a particular conclusion, merely their own.

This isn't to say Harris isn't insidious.  I mean, look at him here, opposing the "corporate" nature of the university:

Too many academics, he complained, favor a meritocratic approach, concentrating on their own individual achievements rather than recognizing that they are "mid-level bureaucrats in large corporations." Harris, for one, described himself as "from a union family and . . . troubled by my position as a manager in a system that treats so many of its teachers unfairly."

Anti-corporate is anti-American, ipso facto it's anti-American to oppose the hiring of adjuncts.  That such hirings are deleterious to the departments that do them, the composition programs that rely on them, and the level of instruction university-wide is beside the point.  Johnson wants to improve the quality of education, whereas Harris wants to improve the quality of education.  Wait, what?  When someone pointed this out to him—in a comment which dispassionately, but damningly, condemns the practice of hiring adjuncts—Johnson disingenuously replied:

Given that, it's rather hard to argue that the academy is organized in a "corporate" fashion—that's a pretty big difference between the academy and the average corporation.

Translation: "I've worked in academia for years, yet somehow (wink wink) I'm not aware that the move to hire adjuncts is related to the desire of many university systems to adopt a more corporate model."

Or: "I have no response to your to comment, so I'll just call Harris 'shallow' again and hope you don't notice that I'm willfully donning blinders to make my point."

Both translations point to Johnson's fundamental commitment to making an argument which entails either willful misreading or gratuitous uncharitableness.

Take your pick.

To return to the baseball metaphor, Johnson's not merely hitting .159, he's hitting an empty .159.  He may have hit a double with Lubiano, but if he trawled the Group of 88 for equal bursts of power and stopped shortly after Harris, he has problems.  He had to force Harris into the mold of which he's but one of many exemplars.  What does that say about the other seventy-four professors whose profiles he hasn't posted?

The impetus behind this post was simple: I noticed that Priscilla Wald belonged to the Group of 88, and wondered why he hadn't profiled her—or, for that matter, any of the scholars with whose work I'm familiar.  (Also, why not Michael Hardt?  I mean, really, why not Hardt?  Wouldn't he be Johnson's perfect foil?)  Then I thought about it: if he tried to characterize their work, he'd give his readers the "wrong" impression; namely, that most of the members of the Group of 88 are responsible, well-respected scholars.

That would've been inconvenient.

Comments

[The Constructivist]

Seriously suggest you read Lubiano's essays and edited collected before you accept Johnson's hit piece. And I'm not just saying that b/c she was my diss advisor and changed my life.

[SEK]

Constructivist, I think it's implicit in what I wrote that the only critique of substance I saw was with what's she's published, not its content. I can't think of a single program that would've accepted her CV (as presented), but I have no issue with the work she's done. I should've been more and/or less subtle, but it's hard to tell these days.

[Jonathan Dresner]

I'm a lot more sympathetic to "forthcoming" since I started working with academic publishers myself. I've had one journal fold after accepting a paper, and another dither for two years with unresponsive reviewers and "wrong stack" errors. And KC's wrong: edited volumes are blind reviewed, but as book manuscripts, not chapter by chapter the way journals are. What standards they hold it to depends, as always, on the reviewer, the press, the editor, but to say that it's "not reviewed" is absurd. I got some critical comments back on the chapter I had in a book published.

Given the parlous state of academic publishing (especially, I imagine, in the overheated world of comp/rhet), tenure committees are sometimes willing to accept completed and submitted manuscripts with some outside review to testify to their quality. So I'm told, anyway: I haven't had that honor yet.

On the broader point, much of the time when KC has published his views on the 88 at Cliopatria, he's been challenged, mostly by other Cliopatricians (Tim Burke, Ralph Luker and, sometimes, myself). That makes your challenge somewhat... moot?

[Jonathan Dresner]

Oh, now I remember. I had another point I wanted to make:

He divined the truth of what happened in Durham on the night of March 13th long before the police announced the results of their investigation. He was correct.

No, KC was always very careful, at least in what I read, to acknowledge that he had no idea whether the charges were correct or not (at least until enough evidence came out for reasonable certainty). What he was right about was that the prosecutor violated his public trust and took shortcuts and played the case in public for political gain, and that the Group of 88 violated its ethical/academic trust and was jumping to conclusions about the case when they had no more idea than he did about the truth of the matter, but played it for political purposes and ignored/shortcut university procedures.

Whether or not we approve of the political stances of the 88, I've never been able to find fault with KC's criticism of their public stance in this case: it was premature, excessive, uncompromising, damaging to the public discourse and to the university community. I disagree with KC about the structural critique he draws from this (which is consistent with the disagreements I had with his structural critiques of the academy before the Duke case arose) and about his individual evaluations of (at least some of) the scholars in question.

[Josh]

Scott, particularly a propos of your takedown of his hits on Harris --after his denunciations of Bérubé and his comments on Inside Higher Ed, it seems clear that Johnson is incapable of reading any academic prose without putting it through his mental Horowitzinator. In a blind review, I have no doubt that he'd categorize the prose of Bauerlein or Genovese as part of the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy. It's a comprehension thing.

[KC Johnson]

Many thanks for the link to DIW; and also for your suggestions on how to manage Cliopatria.

To respond to your two general criticisms:

1.) If I were planning to keep DIW open for the next 73 weeks, I probably would do a Group profile for all 88 members. I am not, however: the blog will have active posst only through next week, and then a few ending posts in September. For the series, then, I tried to choose people who had been active in the lacrosse case (neither Hardt for Wald, to my knowledge, have commented on the case other than signing their statements), with posts somewhat evenly distributed between the departments that included most of the ad's signatories.

Lest your readers misunderstand the focus of DIW: the Group profile series has featured 15 posts (after Monday's concluding post on Bill Chafe). To date, the blog has had 971 posts.

2.) On Harris' "corporate" claim for the academy: your post, in fact, proves the weak nature of Harris' analysis. In any "corporate" environment, Wahneema Lubiano would have been fired long ago. Here's a professor who received tenure without a scholarly monograph, has been claiming to have two monographs forthcoming and under contract for 10 years(!), and in the last eight years, according to her CV, has produced four pages of scholarship. Yet she has a lifetime job, at a salary of probably $100,000. Whatever that arrangement is, it's surely not "corporate."

Moroever, for someone so convinced that the academy is structured in a "corporate" way, Harris didn't seem to behave that way when it came to his own actions. As the head of the University Writing Program and thus "manager" of "contingent labor," Harris should have recognized the dilemma that he presented to his "subordinates" by signing the Group of 88's ad. To maintain employment in the ruthless "corporate" world, surely they would feel some pressure--implicit or explicit--to sign the ad themselves, and thus remain in the good graces of their "boss."

And, indeed, five did so.

Finally, I'm a bit amused by the Howoritzian argument, as I have been publicly denounced by Horowitz and have publicly opposed (through an AHA amendment) the ABOR. In any event, Until Proven Innocent has received strong words of praise from ACLU president Nadine Strossen, former Crossfire co-host and LA Times editorial page editor Mike Kinsley, defense attorney and author John Grisham, and Kirkus Reviews. It would strike me as rather unlikely that such figures would endorse a book that was "positively Horowitzian in tenor and substance."

[Rob Barrett]

The corporate world gave us the Peter Principle (among other theories of improbably successful incompetence), so I don't think theses about the corporatization of the university are undone by the example of Wahneema Lubiano.

[SEK]

KC, first, I said nothing about how to manage Cliopatria. In this regard, I believe there must've be some context I've missed, as you and Ralph both think my criticism of you is a call for your removal from the roster. I said, quite plainly, that "keeping you on the roster does the rest of [the contributors] a disservice." I suspect, given the context I'm missing, that any comparable statement in which I distinguish between what you've written and what your compatriots have would've sounded like I was armchair managing Cliopatria. I wasn't.

As to what you've written here, it's baldly self-contradictory: you claim there's no attempt to create a corporate environment vis-a-vis adjuncts, then say that because of the corporate environment (and the perceptions it creates), Harris was able to pressure his subordinates to sign the Group of 88's statement. You can't have it both ways.

Some specific contentions:

In any "corporate" environment, Wahneema Lubiano would have been fired long ago.

Did you miss the part where I acknowledged that people who abuse the tenure system are an outrage? Yes, any system will be abused. Should we abolish corporate charters because of Enron? Your argument's flawed on its face. Unless, of course, you can present evidence of wide-spread abuse ... which you haven't, and if Harris is any indication, most likely can't.

If I were planning to keep DIW open for the next 73 weeks, I probably would do a Group profile for all 88 members. I am not, however: the blog will have active posts only through next week, and then a few ending posts in September.

Your blog, your prerogative, esp. as you're leaving for Israel shortly. That's entirely understandable. However, as you're making sweeping statements about these fields, I'm assuming you've done the requisite research on all the signatories. That you've chosen to post only profiles of professors flattering your narrative -- and, in Harris' case, manipulate his record in order to do so -- I'm not sure I believe your claim that you'd have posted all eighty-eight. Your audience wouldn't stand for a post detailing the scholarly history of a sound, responsible scholar who signed the statement out of his or her conviction that actual, but unreported, rapes far outnumber false accusations. You whipped that crowd into a frenzy, then went to bank on its shoulders.

[KC Johnson]

To SEK:

"Your audience wouldn't stand for a post detailing the scholarly history of a sound, responsible scholar who signed the statement out of his or her conviction that actual, but unreported, rapes far outnumber false accusations. You whipped that crowd into a frenzy, then went to bank on its shoulders."

As you might know, the current official line coming from the Group of 88 (offered in long articles from a few months back in the Chronicle of Higher Ed and in Diverse) is that the statement had nothing to do with any allegation of rape at all. (This claim, of course, contradicts e-mails from early April 2006 that I obtained and on which I have posted.) If, in fact, there is "a sound, responsible scholar who signed the statement out of his or her conviction that actual, but unreported, rapes far outnumber false accusations," I'd urge that person to admit so now. I hope that you'll join me in the call.

"As to what you've written here, it's baldly self-contradictory: you claim there's no attempt to create a corporate environment vis-a-vis adjuncts, then say that because of the corporate environment (and the perceptions it creates), Harris was able to pressure his subordinates to sign the Group of 88's statement. You can't have it both ways."

I'm sorry if I wasn't clear: I was saying that Harris can't have it both ways. He has claimed--repeatedly--that the academy is a "corporate" environment, which he considers a lamentable development. If that's what he truly believes, then he should have gone out of his way to avoid the appearance of pressuring his "contingent labor" over which he was manager. Instead, of course, he signed the Group statement, and forwarded it to every (non-tenure track) employee of the UWP. So, it seems, when it's an issue that he really cares about, Harris didn't mind throwing his "corporate" weight around.

I have said, on many occasions, that I consider the claim that the academy follows a "corporate" model to be badly flawed.

On Lubiano: again, I apologize if I wasn't clear. I don't advocate abolishing tenure or anything resembling it. (I think schools might consider very minimal post-tenure reviews, simply to ensure that people who are tenured do some work.) I was merely using the Lubiano example to point out the flaws in Harris' "corporate" model. The "corporate" system has nothing like lifetime tenure for employees, nor the freedom of the workers to hire and make permanent their colleagues.

As to your point that "I'm not sure I believe your claim that you'd have posted all eighty-eight . . . You whipped that crowd into a frenzy, then went to bank on its shoulders."

The first sentence seems to me an extraordinarily strong claim to make without any evidence to back it up. As to the second, I'm not sure how you've determined the nature of my "audience" and "crowd." Since August 28, 2006, when I put on a Site Counter, the blog has had just under 2.9 million unique visitors, from 141 countries, and just over 5.26 million hits. I'm also not sure what you mean by "went to bank." The blog has no advertising: I put my own money--around $8000--into twelve trips to Durham to cover hearings and conduct interviews. I did so because I came to believe in the innocence of the three falsely accused students, and also because I recognized that covering the (non-televised) hearings in person was the only way to produce the highest-quality blog. It would be nice if the book sells enough for me to cover the blog costs, although I've never published a book that allowed me to recoup my research expenses, and I don't expect this one will sell well enough to do so, either.

[The Constructivist]

Duke hired Lubiano with tenure after Princeton denied it to her. So I hardly see how she is abusing the system or an example of the Peter Principle, particularly when a number of those who voted against her tenure file had worse publication records than she did at the time. (Do I sound bitter? Hell, yeah! I lost three of my four advisors at a key point in my dissertation to internal department politics.) Unless you want to make an argument for quantity over quality or nothing matters except publications, I don't see how Lubiano is the glaring example of tenured deadwood here. And if you knew anything about her service and teaching record, the deadwood charge would be ludicrous. Much easier to count pages.

[Ralph Luker]

The fact remains, TC, that Lubiano was found *not* to meet expectations of publication by the department at Princeton and Duke tacitly acknowledged its lower standards by offering her a tenured position. In that capacity, she will, undoubtedly, herself vote on the tenuring of junior colleagues and, as likely, some of them will be denied tenure because they do not meet the department's standards for publication. In other words, she will repeat (perhaps she has already) at Duke what embittered you at Princeton.

[Adam Kotsko]

Scott, It's pretty obvious that you were calling for KC to be removed from the Cliopatria roster -- claiming otherwise is downright Jesuitical. Obviously that's not your call to make, and you're not threatening a boycott, but you clearly think that Cliopatria's quality was, on the whole, negatively affected by KC's involvement. Many people, including me, would agree with that assessment. Why back off from what you're obviously saying?

[SEK]

KC:

I was saying that Harris can't have it both ways. He has claimed--repeatedly--that the academy is a "corporate" environment, which he considers a lamentable development. If that's what he truly believes, then he should have gone out of his way to avoid the appearance of pressuring his "contingent labor" over which he was manager.

You're trying to hoist him by his own petard, but to do so, you're having to indulge in what you consider his hypocrisy. The only problem, as I discussed at length in the post, is that he's not being hypocritical: university administrators can't treat tenured employees as disposable; they can, and do, treat adjuncts as such. Harris's point concerns the adjunctification of academia, and on that front, he's absolutely correct. As for your argument that the very act of signing the petition put demands upon the adjuncts under him to do so, well, that's possible. Have you verified with them that that's their reasoning? Have you talked to the adjuncts who didn't sign it? Are they still employed at Duke, or have they moved on? And if they moved on, when did they do so, and why? It seems to me that you've turned the possible into the probable, but I haven't seen any evidence to back this up.

I'm not sure how you've determined the nature of my "audience" and "crowd."

I spent an afternoon reading through the past two month's worth of posts and comments. I define "crowd" by the commentariat you've established, and their interest in the case was obvious. Consider this fellow:

I found it interesting that his only book won a major award from MLA. Getting that award from a Houston Baker organization is akin to [someone] getting an award from [their mother]. Carry about the same weight, anyway.

I edit only because the specifics are too tedious to detail. But he called the MLA a "Houston Baker" organization, as if that alone was condemnation enough. With a few exceptions, your commenters weren't familiar with academia -- outside the stereotype they've encountered via Horowitz. They're a far-right commentariat, and a particular breed at that. This really requires no detailing. You know the audience you wrote for, and you very ably stoked their fires. I could do a rhetorical analysis of your posts, if you'd like, but for now, all I'll say is that when you insert "[naturally]" into any quoted material having to do with race/class/gender, you're playing to a very particular crowd.

I did so because I came to believe in the innocence of the three falsely accused students, and also because I recognized that covering the (non-televised) hearings in person was the only way to produce the highest-quality blog. It would be nice if the book sells enough for me to cover the blog costs, although I've never published a book that allowed me to recoup my research expenses, and I don't expect this one will sell well enough to do so, either.

You spent $8,000 you didn't expect to be recompensed on a blog? That's admirable, actually, a refreshing change from the hunkered mentality of so many bloggers who don't believe in reporting. (And I say this as someone who's taught journalism, and bemoans the echo-chamber effect created when every blogger who "reports" on something does so based on the same three articles.) But when you're pulling in 438,000 readers per month and your blog's featured in the New York Times as the authoritative source for a case of national prominence, and when you've got a book deal, you know you're going to recoup your expenses. I say this not as condemnation, but because it makes little sense to deny the obvious: this book's going to be widely and well received by the anti-academic right, and it's going to sell. Put another way: let me assure you, you're going to get your money back and then some. (First time Malkin/Instapundit/&c. links to it, you'll see you've made a wise investment.)

The first sentence seems to me an extraordinarily strong claim to make without any evidence to back it up.

Actually, the claim that "I'm not sure I believe your claim that you'd have posted all eighty-eight" is easily verified: "Scott," I ask myself, "do you think KC would have published all eighty-eight?" "No, Scott," I reply, "I don't think he would've." Claim verified.

TC:

I think Ralph's correct, and more to the point, ever the most stellar service record doesn't earn you tenure at Duke. Or shouldn't, given how ridiculously high the standards are everywhere else, and given that a number of people with far superior publication records are currently working on the margins of academia.

Adam:

[Y]ou clearly think that Cliopatria's quality was, on the whole, negatively affected by KC's involvement.

I do, and said as much. But saying that isn't calling for his dismissal. I have no reason to think that's my call to make -- but I do think his presence on the roster does the rest of contributors a disservice.

[SEK]

Put another way, Adam: I think Willie Randolph leaving Carlos Delgado in the cleanup spot significantly weakens the Mets lineup. When I say that Moises Alou should bat cleanup instead -- and, thankfully, he finally was -- I don't believe my words are going to have any effect. I have my opinion, sure, but I don't have the expectation that it's going to be heard, much less heeded. Same deal here, except that I'm fairly certain it'll be heard.

[Adam Kotsko]

What's the difference between clearly stating that something should happen and "calling for" that thing?

[SEK]

The belief and/or presumption of efficacy?

[Ralph Luker]

Scott, Was your point that KC should be "benched" at Cliopatria or that Miriam, Tim, Scott, and I should resign in protest of his being there? When you say that links from Michelle Malkin and Glenn Reynolds would be KC's reward, it only confirms my suspicion that your argument is an ideological/political one, rather one about the accuracy of KC's work. In fact, Durham-in-Wonderland's had many links from Instapundit. Which gives me InstaEnvy. And, btw, should Miriam, Scott, Tim, and I threaten to resign because Glenn's bother, Jonathan, is not benched at Cliopatria? Should he be? What about Daniel Larison. He's a paleo-conservative, you know. Damn smart one. And, if KC's Until Proven Innocent wins this year's Lulu Blooker Prize for the best book that began on a blog, I'll count that a feather in Cliopatria's cap -- even though I argued with KC about his position on the lacrosse case more than anyone else at Cliopatria did. That's the reward of our diversity.

[SEK]

Ralph, my point was that, in my opinion, the works he's doing at Durham-in-Wonderland isn't up to par with what I expect from Cliopatria. I don't expect to see Horowitzian attacks coming from Cliopatria's contributors, and that's what I observed over at Durham-in-Wonderland. The problem isn't that they're conservative arguments, but that they're bad arguments. That's why I documented, at some length, how manipulative he's been in profiling the Group of 88. His treatment of Harris is particularly egregious, given that KC knows there's a wide-spread, commonplace belief that administrators have tried to "corporatize" academia, as manifested most prominently in the creation of the adjunct labor force. He makes no argument against that consensus belief. He doesn't even acknowledge it. Instead, Harris is left in the wild, the lone lunatic who thinks academia has adopted corporate values. Actually, make that the lone hypocritical lunatic, since he himself "forced" (presumably, KC presents no evidence) those in his employ to sign the statements. Well, not all of them. Only three, in fact.

All of whom he would've profiled, were he to keep Durham-in-Wonderland running.

My point is that his attacks on academics strikes me not as those made by "damn smart" conservatives, but as the work of ideological hacks like Malkin. As I noted in the original post, he did a solid job reporting the facts of the case, withholding judgment, remaining impartial, &c. But his uncharitable profiles of working scholars seem cut from a far more familiar and banal Horowitzian cloth.

It's evident in the verbal tics, like the aforementioned "[naturally]," and it's painfully obvious when you read the anti-intellectual tripe of his commenters, who say things like:

No doubt these people are popular within their mini-universe. However, when the full story of this mess is written into history, a long chapter will be on just how out of touch with reality campus PC deconstructuralist nonsense had become. Little things like due process, truth vs. scam apparently have no weight in that world.

Or this:

Anyone who has dealt with the tangled jargon of modern academic discourse and is still able to place a catalog order over the phone is due hearty congratulations. The sterile, institutional rhetoric of deconstruction, when itself deconstructed, often reads like the parody Derrida probably meant it to be.

Or this:

KC, I love you man, but an award from the MLA* is more likely to be proof of academic trendiness and political correctness leavened with a dash of incompetence than of excellence.

*Modern Language Association for those fortunate enough to be unfamiliar with these academic moonbats.

Or this:

Color me stupid, but I cannot for the life of me understand how Queer Theory or pre-Columbian Latin American sex practices or other equally arcane subjects are anything but “marginal.” I can assure you that these subjects are not on the Super Highway of academic inquiry and scholarship. I’m not even sure if one could properly assign them to the metaphor of a “foot path.” Further, it is good that libraries like Perkins have shelving for books that gather enough dust to be buried forever, for that is my view of where some of this “stuff” ends up.

Then there's the most compelling proof:

Reading KC is sometimes like watching Leno's monologue.

These people think Leno's funny. Case closed. But seriously, KC's not responsible for what his readers say, obviously, but that they say it -- in droves, and enthusiastically -- speaks to the audience he's addressing, and the manner in which he's doing so. Again, it's not the ideology, it's the anti-intellectualism, the poor argumentation, &c. that bothers me.

[KC Johnson]

A few points of reply, as I sign off from this thread:

1.) I'm unaware that I ever accused Prof. Harris of "forcing" anyone to sign the Group of 88's statement.

2.) On the issue of blog commenters, I'd recommend a recent clip from Markos Moulitsas at the Colbert Report. The tactic of using the remarks of commenters to discredit what the blogger has to say was used by Bill O'Reilly to attack DailyKos. I stand with Moulistas on this point.

3.) I spent my own money on the blog because--Ivan Tribble notwithstanding--I believe that my reputation can and will be affected by anything published in my name, and therefore I wanted to produce the highest quality product possible. I believe you might have misread my earlier comment: I put a good portion of the money into the blog before I had a book contract, and therefore had no reason to assume I would ever see it again.

Perhaps you're correct that heavy blog readership leads to large book sales, but that isn't a business model that has frequently occurred in the blogosphere. (If it did, we'd all be rich!) That said, I hope the book sells extremely well, and therefore will be delighted if your prediction is correct on this matter, and mine is wrong.

4.) I reiterate the extraordinary nature of your claim that, if the blog had continued, I would not have profiled all 88, even though I said I would.

Finally, I'll conclude with the opening paragraph of your post, as well as an item from your last comment: "banal Horowitzian cloth." The blog (around 750,000 words) is obviously longer than the book (around 130,000 words). But the basic take on the Duke faculty's role and rationale for action is similar in both the blog and the book. Perhaps I'm naive, but I rather doubt that Nadine Strossen, Mike Kinsley, John Grisham, and Kirkus would give strong, public endorsements of a book that takes a "Horowitzian" approach. Or, perhaps, the first three chose to endorse the book because they wanted to jumpstart my new organization: Pro-Gay Marriage, Pro-Choice "Horowitzians" for Obama in '08.

[The Constructivist]

Scott, I think Ralph's point is more to the point, as Wahneema had no service record at Duke when she was hired with tenure. Sure, had she been hired without tenure, the best service (and teaching) record in the world wouldn't have been enough for her to get it without scholarly productivity at a place like Duke, but if you're going to get into hypotheticals like that, then you have to grant me similar "what if"s such as major surgeries, deaths of close relatives, and more not happening in the past near-decade in her life.

Ralph, your point about standards is worth responding to. Duke was doing in the late '90s what Vanderbilt has been doing recently--raiding talented faculty from more established places in an effort to improve their humanities departments and national reputations. Whenever you do that you run a risk that the up-and-coming people won't come up or the established people you went for turn out to have been past their prime. If academics were any better at this sort of thing than general managers of professional sports teams, I'd be shocked. Just because Lubiano hasn't yet matched in research quantity what she's already established in quality is not a reason to write her off as a scholar. Yet thanks to KC, that's what people around the country will be tempted to do.

[Timothy Burke]

I will stay uncharacteristically simple here. The major thing that I'm not happy about when I read Durham-in-Wonderland is KC's commentariat, who can get really ugly at times and even when they're more restrained, seem to me to have a general spirit of anti-intellectualism that goes way, way beyond a criticism of any specific professor.

Are bloggers responsible for their commentariat? Not for the most part. But they are responsible for setting the mood and tone on some level. KC's perfectly entitled to criticize the Group of 88 for signing, and to see their signatures as indicative of some broader procedural, political or institutional problems, not just at Duke but in the profession as a whole. I think that when he branches out to attack their entire careers by implying that a profile of their professional work is germane for the criticism of a specific action, he not only oversteps, he encourages some of ugliness in his comments section. At the very least, I'd like to see him rebuke the uglier comments a bit more often than he does--though he has done that from time to time. It's the verging-on-adhominem in specific that worries me.

I'm often reminded of a scholar I knew when I was in graduate school, an anthropologist. The guy was a terrific reader and editor of other people's writings--grad students and colleagues turned preferentially to him for help with what they were working on. He had an eye for clear language but he was also wonderfully creative and knowledgeable with suggested citations, the very opposite of a disciplinary dogmatist. He was also a very good teacher within the classroom, and a terrific mediating presence in meetings and workshops. It seemed to me that he was of immense value to the institution, that he made enormous contributions to everyone's productivity. The problem? He had published very little work himself at the time. So it was made clear to him by some colleagues that they would deny him tenure. He decided not to fight it and went on to work for a major international institution, after which he became a prominent political leader in his home country and now the head of the national university (and the author of a forthcoming book).

If at the time of his tenure decision, he'd fallen under an outsider's scrutiny, he wouldn't have had the externally controversial or political stances to his name that figure in KC's profile of Lubiano, but he wouldn't have appeared very accomplished, either. And yet, I would rather have seen him had tenure than many others with longer lists of publications, because of what he did for the institution that paid him and the community of which he was a part.

I think that's what bothers me about the "profiles" part of Durham-in-Wonderland, commentariat aside: the lack of professional sympathy and curiosity, of a willingness to think about who these people are, what they've done, what they found themselves penning a signature that was so seriously in error. Yes, I know, I know: why show charity towards those who haven't shown it to others? Maybe because two rights don't make a wrong? Because you can criticize a bad decision without assuming that it makes everything that a person has done worthless? Because we're trying to practice the sort of judiciousness and care that the Group of 88 failed to practice?

[Timothy Burke]

Well, not so uncharacteristically simple, I guess. Had more to say that I expected when I started.

[steve from DC]

the claim of anti-intellectualism in DIW is meaningless. What passes for intellectualism in your blog may only mean you wrap your opinions in better phraseology than is present is DIW commenters-- although I have not seen that in this posting. If what you mean is a logical and dispassionate argument in support of your opinion -- that too is missing in this post. What in the world does it matter if KC has not profiled 70 plus signers of the Group of 88? He did profile a number of them and many of those profiled can only charitably be characterized as anything more than ridiculous. The basic point of the blog as I understand it was to shine a bright light on a injustice in the making. In that, he was incredibly successful. Do you seriously contend that the group petition by 88 Duke "educators" condemning three innocent young men was appropriate? What I think KC is doing is trying to understand and explain why they did what they did and inexplicably why all but one have refused to apologize. Has he made statements with which reasonably people can differ? Undoubtedly, but he addresses the conflict, and either attempts to prove his point with appropriate support or unlike the 87 has apologized. I think Cliopatria is enhanced by his presence.

[Ralph Luker]

Like Tim, I occasionally winced at some of the things said in comments at D-i-W. In one case, when my name was involved, I asked KC to delete comments by others that were over-the-line sexist and he did. It's a big job to monitor comments on a blog that has drawn so large an audience and commentariat as D-i-W and KC's walked a line between being a control freak and allowing people to have their say. I certainly want to believe that Tim doesn't hold me accountable for anything said by Grant Jones in comments at Cliopatria. No matter how inhospitable I am, he returns and walks just this side of getting himself banned for stupidity.

Tim's other point, about seeing in a person's response to a particular event as indicative, even indictive, of a larger worldview interests me very much. In seminary, I studied in a post-World War II intellectual atmosphere that was powerfully influenced the failure of established churches in Germany to resist Nazification. Those who did resist -- Barth, Bonhoeffer, Niemoller, etc -- were our heroes. We suspected that there was some crucial flaw in the theological enterprise of those who failed at that critical moment -- Bultmann, Gogarten, etc. Nifong isn't Adolf Hitler; Duke lacrosse isn't Nazi Germany. But I've watched the kind of faculty development that Bill Chafe wrought in Duke's humanities and social sciences and, frankly, the results are just disappointing. Tell me why it's a good idea that the history department has three Latin Americanists, all of whom do gender history. Three slots really ought to yield and Latin America certainly deserves Latin American expertise that is much more broadly based than that.

[Timothy Burke]

Ralph, that's a point you and I and KC have talked about before. You know my preference is for breadth of specialization in building a department, but there is a valid argument to be made for a graduate department building narrowly within a particular subspecialization as a strategy for building up a program.

If you start with a weak graduate program in a particular area and you want to get stronger, in fact, I almost think that narrowness is a smart strategem. There are departments that have a very large number of Latin Americanists; if you actually want grad students in that field and can't build to that size, why not get three people with closely overlapping work to attract the few extraordinary students out there who might want to work specifically on gender in Latin America?

Now this leaves two other problems which worry me a lot more, but they haven't struck me as being KC's main concern, as he is often far more focused on scholarly output. First, this does undergraduates a disservice. But you know, so do most research universities, even if they have a broad rather than narrow allocation of specialization. Second, there's a very large-scale question of how the entire discipline allocates specialization, but you know full well I remain unconvinced that patterns at Duke, Harvard, etc., scale to the entirety of higher education. Moreover, as we've talked about before, KC has a very mechanical view of how the profession reproduces over time. He assumes that whatever the allocations are today, they automatically reproduce themselves tomorrow. How a historian can have such an ahistorical view of his own institutional worlds, I'm not clear, but it seems to me that he doesn't have any way to account for how social history rose out of diplomatic and political history, or how cultural history came from social history, etc.--because to account for that would allow for the possibility that today's specializations will not be tomorrow's. And maybe that the best way to shift the balance is to actually write the kind of specialized history that one prefers and write it compellingly, rather than argue against everyone else's choices.

[Ralph Luker]

I suspect, however, that the subspecialty concentration that your argument may justify in R-1 graduate programs does, in fact, get replicated more commonly in liberal arts college curricula than you may imagine. At Antioch, I never could get a clear explanation why we had no basic American Literature course, we had no Women's Literature course, we had no African American Literature course, but we sure as hell had an African American Women's Literature course. We were concentrating what we now know for sure were rapidly dwindling resources on teaching about less and less.

[Timothy Burke]

I completely agree that's a problem at liberal arts colleges. But the problem isn't with the political character of the choices (which is how KC usually frames it), it's with adopting the logic of specialization at all. A liberal arts college would be just as flawed if it chose to hire five diplomatic historians in a department of seven people, for example--or six specialists in colonial American political history.

[Timothy Burke]

The August 28th entry at Durham-in-Wonderland is a pretty low point for KC, in my view. Either he doesn't understand how academic publishing works, isn't curious to find out, or he does understand it and is consciously stoking up his less knowledgeable readers.

Disclosure: my 1996 monograph was published by Duke University Press, and I've peer-reviewed manuscripts for them from time to time. (Some of which, on my advice or that of other peer reviewers, they then declined to publish.) About the only thing against Duke U. Press I could say is that in the last five years, they've maybe had too big a list. Yes, their list has a particular slant, but academic publishing doesn't require that you publish any decent monograph that crosses your door. Different scholarly publishers definitely have an identity, a particular reputation with regard to specialization, and KC knows that perfectly well. At least I hope he does: it's a pretty basic facet of the scholarly world. Some publishers are known for their geographic emphasis (Duke, for example, is known for publishing in Latin American studies), some for their intellectual or ideological bent (Minnesota publishes a lot of critical theory). That's good niche marketing: it's not some conspiracy. There are scholarly publishers known for emphasizing diplomatic, technological, economic, or political history, for example.

And yes, some publishers have a higher reputation than others, particularly among university presses. But among university presses, I'd say that Duke is generally very well respected by a large range of scholars of varying orientations. It's certainly a very professional, well-run press--my experience with them was great, in comparison to dealing with another very well-regarded university press. It's not a "vanity press" as one of KC's commenters puts it (and KC implies). They ask for tough independent peer reviews and they get them.

---

Another point that really disturbed me in a recent entry: KC saying that he would never assign work by Chafe again in his classes because he thinks that Chafe's handling of evidence in the Group of 88 case suggests that his work with evidence in his published monographs is likely to be intolerably flawed as well. Them's fighting words in academia. If KC wants to suggest that a scholar's published output has evidentiary flaws--or is dishonest--then DO THE WORK and find out. Otherwise this is just a shoddy insinuation and deeply unprofessional. There are plenty of academics who have different standards for what they do as public and political figures from what they do as scholars. Frankly, I think KC's standards for an entry like the one on Duke University Press are different than the high standards he's demonstrated in his scholarly work. Moreover, there's something unprofessional in saying, "I won't assign important work in a field to my students because I have a *political* disagreement with that scholar". That's holding your students hostage to your own ideological and political views, or subordinating your professional representation of your disciplinary field to your activist commitments. I assign work by people whose methodologies seem seriously dubious to me because it's important work in a field. (And this is when I can point specifically to what bothers me rather than insinuating indirectly about it.) It may be germane to talk about what I see as problematic when I teach it, certainly, but not to act as if it doesn't exist.

[Ralph Luker]

Two things: My point in mentioning Bultmann and Gogarten is that because of their failure to oppose the Nazification of the German churches, I suspected that there was a crucial flaw at the heart of their theological enterprise. When I subsequently taught courses in Religion, as I sometimes did, I'd be hesitant to require students to read their books for that reason. Am I intellectually lazy because, even to this day, I cannot say exactly where that flaw is? I don't see that kind of flaw in Chafe's early work on the civil rights movement, but I do see a congruence between his later work and a kind of uncritical hell-bound for racial and gender multi-culturalism in his management of arts and sciences at Duke. One colossal blunder that just threw $50,000 down a rathole convinced me, as an alum, never to contribute anything to my alma mater again. Those blinders also gave little attention to the necessity of genuine intellectual diversity in a healthy academic community. It created the kind of intellectual homogeneity that could lead a very substantial part of Duke's A & S faculty over the cliff on Duke lacrosse. I should say, however, that I disagree with KC's understanding of what intellectual diversity is.

I can understand your sensitivity to KC's criticism of Duke University Press. I might rise up if he similarly attacked UNC Press. But when UNC published Christine Heyrman's *Southern Cross* in paperback, with its grade-school errors in its tables at the back of the book and its racially exclusionary interpretation of Southern evangelicalism, I didn't hesitate to call for a revised second edition or withdrawing the book altogether.

KC is trying to figure out where the fault lies that could lead a very large group of apparently intelligent faculty-members, most of whom are supposed to have some training in critical thinking, to going leeming off a cliff in a critical moment. To note their affinity with Duke University Press isn't beyond the pale. In fact, I'd say that as faculty members at Duke, they might better have been advised to avoid submitting their work to its own Press. Their work might have gotten a tougher pre-publication review with an outside press. That point wouldn't apply to your work, because you're not a Duke faculty member.

[KC Johnson]

I had signed off on this thread, but figured it would be worthwhile to respond to four of Tim's points:

1.) "Moreover, there's something unprofessional in saying, 'I won't assign important work in a field to my students because I have a *political* disagreement with that scholar'. That's holding your students hostage to your own ideological and political views, or subordinating your professional representation of your disciplinary field to your activist commitments."

That's not what I said in the Chafe post. I did say that I was troubled by (1) a high-profile scholar of civil rights getting a basic fact wrong about a key civil rights event in a published article; (2) the extraordinary inappropriateness of Chafe's use of history in his op-ed. Both those matters raised concerns for me about Chafe. Now, I could spend a lot of time tracking down Chafe's sources to see if he was similarly biased in his scholarly work. Or, I could simply assign another book--there are, of course, other very good books on 1960s liberalism or the civil rights movement. I said in the post that I'll do the latter.

If people want to not assign my books based on what I've written in the blog, they're perfectly free to do so. I'm not naive in assuming that the blog doesn't affect how people view me.

2.) "Moreover, as we've talked about before, KC has a very mechanical view of how the profession reproduces over time. He assumes that whatever the allocations are today, they automatically reproduce themselves tomorrow. How a historian can have such an ahistorical view of his own institutional worlds, I'm not clear, but it seems to me that he doesn't have any way to account for how social history rose out of diplomatic and political history, or how cultural history came from social history, etc.--because to account for that would allow for the possibility that today's specializations will not be tomorrow's."

Tim and I have had this discussion before, obviously, on Cliopatria. I'll ask Tim now a question I've asked him before: perhaps he could indicate one History Department that has seen social/cultural historians come to predominate that has decided--to balance things off--to boost coverage of political, diplomatic, or military history.

In this regard, I'm more persuaded by Mark Bauerlein's model--that the "groupthink" approach is likely to yield more extreme departments over time, with less pedagogical diversity. Obviously, this dispute won't be resolved till we can see what will happen in 20 years, but I don't see any clear evidence to persuade me of Tim's optimistic view.

3.) I did not "imply" that Duke was a "vanity" press. If I had meant to so imply, I would have said so: I certainly don't pull any punches in my posts. I stated that Duke had an EAB that disproportionately consisted of Group of 88 members, that they unsurprisingly found Group members' scholarship attractive, and that several Group members had DUP books as their only monographs before tenure.

As someone who has published three books with University presses, and with a fourth on the way, I quite well "understand how academic publishing works."

4.) On Lubiano: I have no problem with Duke (or any other institution) adopting the tenure criteria that Tim outlined for his colleague who hadn't published much. I'm actually quite sympathetic to Tim's argument on this point. But, if so, Duke (or any other institution) has to change its criteria.

A Research-I institution can't say that it expects research publications from its professors and then say that it's not going to hold politically attractive professors to a different standard.

[AMac]

Scott, speaking as a regular D-i-W reader and frequent commenter, I want to thank you for presenting your criticisms of KC Johnson, and then hosting this debate.

Speaking as a non-academic, I disagree with many many of your premises and a fair number of your assertions. For reasons of time and to provide focus, I'll remark only on blog comments at D-i-W.

There is no obvious right answer that I can see as to how a blogger ought to handle comments. When the number is low and old friends (or even familiar adversaries) are dropping by, it's not much of an issue. Problems scale with volume, and with the emotional resonance of the chosen blog subject. Abortion or Iraq will be harder to deal with than My Little Pony collectibles.

The Duke Lacrosse Hoax/Frame is obviously an area that a sizeable number of people care about, a lot, and that moreover makes many of them angry.

Each choice about comments has advantages and disadvantages. Allowing authors to contribute anonymously adds to incivility and even vitriol--but also tips the balance in favor of commenting for certain people who would otherwise remain silent. I strongly suspect--KC could affirm or deny--that more than one person with inside knowledge of some aspect of the Hoax/Frame was first moved to participate in the "public square" by leaving an anonymous comment at D-i-W, and then later, gradually, moved up the ladder of accountability. I suspect (again, without certain knowledge) that some "rings-true" anonymous commentary made other insiders feel less isolated, and contributed to their decision to speak out more forcefully.

Johnson has been running a blog, and it has also been partly a perhaps-inadvertent experiment in journalism. In my opinion, more light was shed on the Hoax/Frame by blogs--D-i-W first among them--than by traditional media. (Joe Neff of the Raleigh News & Observer is the only mainstream newspaper or TV reporter who comes to mind whose pavement-pounding has regularly advanced public understanding. Sadly, it is easier to name those who've damaged that cause.)

So, while I would say that the overall tone of D-i-W's comments has often been deficient, Johnson's approach has had benefits, too.

In addition, different bloggers have had different philosophies on comments. During the Rape/Hoax case, for instance, some leftward academic bloggers have made offensive and factually-incorrect remarks on their blogs that have attracted spirited rebuttals and discussions in their open comments--culminating in the deletion of the challenging comments or, in some cases, in the closing of the blog to public view. This is clearly these bloggers' prerogatives--they own the printing presses in question.

Johnson has taken an opposite view, allowing a wide range of comments to stand--my guess would be north of 95% of what is submitted. As Scott in the post and many in the comments remarked, this allows readers to recognize the depth of anger towards the people and institutions that, these commenters feel, have violated their trust--as Duke alumni in some cases, though in most cases, simply as Citizens. High on many lists of those institutions is the one that most Acephalous readers are affiliated with--the Academy.

By allowing mostly-open comments, Johnson may be more the bearer than the creator of bad news. Allowing "horowitzians" to have their say ought to be distinguishable from self-identifying as one.

As far as D-i-W's commenters: yes, many of "us" are some combination of simplistic, angry, right-wing, and anonymous. On the other hand, many others lack one, two, three, or four of those traits.

As someone who is missing two-and-a-half to three-and-a-half of the aforementioned, I look at the comments as streambed gravel. I can quickly bypass most. Some, I enjoy, the way I might hold a prettily polished stone. And then there are occasional nuggets, providing real insight.

Scott and many here may display a rather condescending view of D-i-W's commentariat and readership. You might or might not be surprised to discover that most of Johnson's readers have not left their critical facilities at the coat check. You can dare to read his Siren-like offerings without worrying too much about falling under the sway of dangerous mind-control rays.

So can his regular readers.

[Timothy Burke]

A couple of responses to KC's thoughts.

1) On the point about his sympathy to other criteria besides research output for tenure. This is where he really needs to perform an educative function for his Durham-in-Wonderland readers, then. Read your comments, KC! You're leaving people with the entirely wrong idea--that the only legitimate metric of academic value is extensive scholarly output, and that anyone who lacks that doesn't belong in a selective university. I understand what you're saying about holding Duke to its own declared standards--and the corollary suggestion you're making that the undeclared criteria for tenure is diversity. But I really think you can explore this argument in a way that is both more forceful and more nuanced--forceful in discouraging some of the more ignorant or unfair inferences your commenters are drawing, and nuanced in laying out what you think valid normative strategies for tenuring faculty might actually be. You're not responsible for your commenters' biases, but you can do a better job at discouraging them from seeing their biases confirmed by the way you're writing.

2) Read your commenters on Duke U. Press. They're definitely coming away from your post assuming that you are arguing that the number of Duke U. faculty serving as editorial advisors means that the output of the press is effectively valueless, without peer review, a vanity output, and the like. I think you can be a lot clearer about discouraging that reading. For one, you don't really talk about what it is that an Editorial Advisory Board at a university press does, or help your readers to understand the history of university presses. Originally, they were intended explicitly to publish scholarly monographs that would not interest major commercial publishers, and to some extent that's still their function. (Though increasingly even they have to sell a significant number of copies on most monographs, as the subsidies coming from university budgets have dropped or been eliminated.) To some extent, such boards are a holdover from the days when each university press was more deeply connected to the life of a particular university. You still see that all over the place not just with university presses but with many academic journals, including many journals (and presses) that have ideological and disciplinary orientations very very different from Duke University Press. But a lot of what such boards do now is symbolic or titular. If they have any function, it's to help find peer reviewers for manuscripts and to assess the work of peer reviewers once complete (as Weintraub suggests). The final and substantive decisions about what gets published are left to the professional editors and also to series editors if the book is part of a particular series. Yet you very clearly imply that there is something unwholesome going on with DUP's Editorial Advisory Board, and imply that somehow Duke is unusual or particularly flawed in this structural arrangement.

You're an educator. You should educate. Instead, in this case, you're leading a lot of your readers to come away with some seriously inaccurate impressions--that there is something odd about Duke's structural arrangements, that there is some kind of collusive arrangement that is letting Duke professors publish weak monographs (rather than acknowledging that at least for some of them, Duke really is one of the top publishers in their field). MIT Press, for example, is a top publisher in studies of information technology and new media. If an MIT author working those fields published with MIT Press, there wouldn't be anything odd or unwholesome about that. University of Chicago Press is a top publisher in anthropology; if a Chicago anthropologist published with them, that would make enormous sense.

Your first two monographs were published by Harvard University Press,KC. You have a BA and a Ph.D from Harvard. It would make as much sense for me to suggest that your first two books were published as a result of a nepotistic relationship to Harvard as it does for you to offer a blanket insinuation that all Duke professors publishing with Duke U. Press have somehow been the reciepients of favoritism. You can say that's not what you meant to suggest or say--but if not, what's the point of the Aug. 28th entry? Your first two monographs stand on their own: they're very fine works of diplomatic history. If someone were to critique them, their first and last job is to engage them as works. The same should go here: you have a complaint about someone's scholarly work? Make it about their scholarly work. That's your professional and scholarly obligation.

All we have as scholars and intellectuals is our reputation capital. We don't earn money from what we write, for the most part. YES, I understand the bitter, horrible irony of defending the reputation capital of professionals who were cavalier about the reputation of others. You're entitled to make a lot of noise about that as often as you like, particularly the inability of scholars to acknowledge error. That's also part of our job. But if you're going to criticize scholars for innuendo, insinuation, for leaping between the specificity of evidence and the sweeping accusation, then you need to be unusually diligent about best practices on your own account. And I'm sorry, but in some of your Durham entries, you're not.

[Steve Horwitz]

Tim,

Having tried to make the argument in DIW comments that we know neither the outside evaluation of the *quality* of the publications of those faculty tenured on just a few, nor their teaching and service, and that therefore we can't look only at the number of publications to determine "tenure-worthiness," I can tell you that attempts to educate will fall on deaf ears.

At the end of the day, for many of the most angry and vociferous commenters there, the problem is with the *content* of the scholarship (note all the sarcasm about "floating phalluses") not the quantity nor quality nor any other contributions they may have had. Thus the natural conclusion is that they were all tenured in by "comrades" who have no standards.

And if it's not about that, it's about the fact that signing on to the Listening Statement ipso facto made them unworthy of recognition as a valuable member of the Duke community.

Explaining the complexities of the tenure process, and academia more broadly, has largely been an exercise in head-meet-wall for me there, but I persist in the hope that the "silent majority" of his readership can learn something.

Also - with respect to publishing at the university press of one's home institution: Yes, it need not be a sign of lax standards. But if there's a pattern of it, either by one faculty member or across faculty members, it will raise the questions that KC has brought up today. Even if the processes by which manuscripts were selected and reviewed were "clean," I would think people would try to avoid even the appearance of an issue. Why risk those questions in the first place?

[Timothy Burke]

It's why I haven't tried to enter the conversation there, Steve. I don't feel there's any chance at all of being heard.

One reason that I think someone might publish with their "home" press is simply that it's the best or most reputable press in the subject area that they're publishing in. Duke is certainly one of the top presses in cultural studies and cultural history, for example. If I were at the University of Ohio, for example, it would be strange not to consider publishing with the very prestigious Social History of Africa series that has moved to that press from Heinemann.

But also, *if* a press turns to well-respected peer reviewers outside of the institution, honestly, there shouldn't be any issue about whether they publish faculty at that institution, even if faculty have an advisory role at the press--as long as those peer reviews are respected and listened to. Knowing whether that's the case poses some of the same problems as knowing about the integrity of any given tenure and promotion process--it's confidential. So you have to judge a bit by results. The Duke output that I read, I think it's pretty solid stuff. Occasionally, as I said, I think their list got a bit big, with a slight drop on quality as a result (rather like Routledge in the 1990s). And it's not for everyone's taste, sure. But that's another thing that's so frustrating about the conversations that KC is encouraging at DIW. KC, like a number of other critics, purports to be in favor of increased intellectual diversity in the academy, but he has a lot of scorn for a huge swath of intellectual work that doesn't conform to his own preferences--often without reading or engaging that work beyond its title and abstract. That's redoubled in the comments section, where it seems to many commenters to be impossible that anyone could write scholarship about race, class, gender, sexuality, popular culture, non-Western societies, without it all being undifferentiated bunkum. Intellectual diversity should be about making room for more styles, methodologies, topics: not about throwing out the entire corpus of scholarly work in some fields in favor of diplomatic, political, or intellectual history written in a more traditional style. If that's what it should be about, it's important to strike a tone that is appreciative of all good scholarly craftwork, even when it's about a topic or written from a political perspective that you personally have no interest in or strongly oppose on some level.

[The Constructivist]

KC wrote:

"On Lubiano: I have no problem with Duke (or any other institution) adopting the tenure criteria that Tim outlined for his colleague who hadn't published much. I'm actually quite sympathetic to Tim's argument on this point. But, if so, Duke (or any other institution) has to change its criteria."

Now you're missing the same point Scott has been missing and I'll capitalize the missing part for you both: Lubiano was hired WITH TENURE. Her publication record was JUST FINE for an up-an-coming African Americanist (specialist, not identity category, just to clarify for you) at that point in her career and at that stage in the development of the field, when writing strong essays and editing influential essay collections was the norm among even a good number of the top people in the field. And that's not indicative of "lower standards" in the field--it's indicative of how important it was in the '90s to get groundbreaking work out quickly, how productive the field was then (and remains so, even as more books come out in this decade from specialists). Only someone ignorant of or hostile to the field itself would say otherwise. To draw an analogy: no one at Duke had any reason to imagine Lubian wasn't on track to be the next Gayatri Spivak. And there's good reason to suspect it could still happen.

But hey, if Scott doesn't want to admit you're 0 for 88 by calling a foul ball fair, that's his business. Never mind that your profile cherry picks quotes in an even clumsier way than the smear campaign on Patricia Williams that I documented back in 1997. That kind of profiling leads straight to the predictable welfare queen speculations among your commentariat. Maybe you should apply for a Manhattan Institute grant so you can monitor the comments more carefully. And distill the poison in your pen a little more. Barely above Horowitz, not yet approaching Heather MacDonald.

[The Constructivist]

I challenge anyone to read this by Lubiano and see support for the accuracy of KC's profile in it. It's ironically fitting that while making the same move Williams did in analyzing the rhetorical constructions of Tawana Brawley and their effects (in The Alchemy of Race and Rights), Lubiano gets tarred with the same brush Williams's opponents used.

[The Constructivist]

And please don't repeat the same talking points you can find on a quick google blog search that cherry pick, distort, and miss the main point of the talk.

I dissent from the view expressed earlier on this thread by Steve Horwitz and Timothy Burke.

It is certainly the case that many of their adjectives apply to many of Durham-in-Wonderland's comments. But since many of the most passionate authors write early and often, it does not necessarily follow that the observation holds for as high a percentage of commenters. Beyond that, it's fairly clear to me that most readers at most blogs 'lurk' rather than adding their two cents. To be specific, at Durham-in-Wonderland, there is a steady flow of notes beginning, "While I have followed this blog for some time, this is my first time..."

Put another way--persuading, being appreciated, and setting the tone of a blog's comments are not the same. In this instance, as a non-academic, I have greatly benefited from Steve Horwitz's background explanations of the mechanics of tenure and promotion decisions in humanities and social science departments. I strongly suspect I am far from the only reader who appreciated Steve's efforts, nor was he the only commenter to share a specialist's knowledge on an esoteric but relevant subject.

Of course, I recognize that this comment is also making a the case for the virtues of greater civility than many commenters show at D-i-W. Anything that has the effect of driving away the likes of Steve Horwitz and repelling the likes of Tim Burke can hardly be said to be "adding to the conversation." I noted earlier that I understand KC Johnson's choice of comment philosophy; I should add that it is not my own, for these reasons.

Beyond comments, I found one of Tim Burke's seeming assumptions to be of note. He notes (2:02pm) that "KC... has a lot of scorn for a huge swath of intellectual work that doesn't conform to his own preferences... That's redoubled in the comments section, where it seems to m