(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
That would've been inconvenient.
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?
Posted by: Timothy Burke | Monday, 27 August 2007 at 03:33 PM
Well, not so uncharacteristically simple, I guess. Had more to say that I expected when I started.
Posted by: Timothy Burke | Monday, 27 August 2007 at 03:34 PM
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.
Posted by: steve from DC | Monday, 27 August 2007 at 06:34 PM
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.
Posted by: Ralph Luker | Monday, 27 August 2007 at 09:50 PM
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.
Posted by: Timothy Burke | Monday, 27 August 2007 at 10:27 PM
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.
Posted by: Ralph Luker | Monday, 27 August 2007 at 11:34 PM
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.
Posted by: Timothy Burke | Tuesday, 28 August 2007 at 08:09 AM
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.
Posted by: Timothy Burke | Tuesday, 28 August 2007 at 08:32 AM
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.
Posted by: Ralph Luker | Tuesday, 28 August 2007 at 09:53 AM
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.
Posted by: KC Johnson | Tuesday, 28 August 2007 at 10:02 AM
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.
Posted by: AMac | Tuesday, 28 August 2007 at 10:20 AM
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.
Posted by: Timothy Burke | Tuesday, 28 August 2007 at 10:42 AM
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?
Posted by: Steve Horwitz | Tuesday, 28 August 2007 at 03:18 PM
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.
Posted by: Timothy Burke | Tuesday, 28 August 2007 at 04:02 PM
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.
Posted by: The Constructivist | Tuesday, 28 August 2007 at 11:14 PM
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.
Posted by: The Constructivist | Tuesday, 28 August 2007 at 11:36 PM
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.
Posted by: The Constructivist | Tuesday, 28 August 2007 at 11:43 PM
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 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."
I think most readers of D-i-W do not see all scholarship about race, class, gender, et al. as bunkum. (E.g., I cannot imagine studying the Civil War without race looming large, or the Bolsheviks without class, or Sufferage without gender!) Conversely, I don't believe that many generalist readers could work through a sizable fraction of current scholarship in these areas without pegging the bunkum meter with some regularity. It's not binary. Some but not all work in area X may be terrific; some but not all may have the characteristics of an intellectual fad.
From the outside, one of the academy's larger problems appears to be the absence of mechanisms for dealing with the sort of bunkum scholarship that the weakest of Duke's faculty appear to have produced.
Put another way, the readers of Acephalous would not have to be evolutionary biologists to understand the "not even wrong" nature of creation-science scholarship. This despite the reputable-seeming "citation circle" that creation scientists have succeeded in manufacturing to legitimate their enterprise. The Sokal Hoax would strongly suggest that this sort of gamesmanship is not limited to biology. And, of course, the publisher of the journal Social Text brings the conversation back around to the topic of the D-i-W post under discussion.
Posted by: AMac | Wednesday, 29 August 2007 at 09:09 AM
Having written the prior comment, I now get to turn around and eat crow.
I added to the Comments of the D-i-W post under discussion here--
Sigh.
Posted by: AMac | Wednesday, 29 August 2007 at 10:00 AM
observations of a non academic:
While I understand academics rising to the defense of their profession and even perhaps individual colleagues I do not understand the criticism of KC's blog as either anti-intellectual or failing to perform a mission it never set out to perform - educating its readers concerning the dynamics of academia. Anti-intellectualism of the blog cannot be demonstrated by the stupid remarks by commenters at that blog - if that were the case this blog suffers from the same deficiency. I fail to see any indications of anti-intellectualism (whatever that might be)on the part of KC's words. Of course, he has not fully explored every aspect of every(or even any) thing he has written on DIW; but, it is not a scholarly work. His writings on the blog are comparable to either a news story or an op ed piece. These are by their nature short and incomplete; but, they appear to contain a great deal of truth. As to his purported failure to "teach" his readers about academia and its dynamics - I doubt he ever set out to do any such thing. His blog addresses individuals who, by their actions, appear base and cowardly. That their specialties or their writings appear trivial, silly or merely stupid is simply amusing unless you would like to factor in the facts that many of us are paying a great deal of money for their children to be "educated" by these people. The fact that some of these professors cannot be characterized in this way does not make them less base or cowardly nor does it save the ones that can.
I think my basic problem with this blog is the refusal by its author and many of its commenters to recognize the affirmative good that DIW has done not only in the specific case involving the falsely accused Lacrosse kids but the more rigourous debate it has engendered concerning both prosecutorial misconduct and the ideological makeup of at least one (and probably many) heretofore elite universities.
One final observation: Publishing at your own univeristy press is an indication )although clearly not dispositive) that it is the only place you can be published. Publishing all your works at your own press reinforces that presumption.
Posted by: steve from DC | Thursday, 30 August 2007 at 06:06 AM