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

[Total]

"ne 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."

No, as Tim Burke has been at some pains to discuss, it doesn't.

[steve from DC]

who could disagree with that well reasoned point?

[Mr. Y]

Let’s get serious. KC Johnson is an academic hack – yes, he has a few books, but as a diplomatic historian, he has had negligible impact on the field. His work is hardly cited, and his books simply aren’t taught. He was, at best, a mediocre historian, and destined to remain in anonymity until he parlayed a tenure fight into a self-righteous crusade. In that episode, Johnson got a lot of mileage out of presenting himself as fighting against political correctness, but the facts say different. Those in his Brooklyn College department who tried to block his tenure were not leftists, but rather his former conservative patrons who grew tired of his antics and withdrew their support. So while he is a middling scholar, he is a good huckster, selling that fight to a media ever on the lookout for the excesses of the academic left.

Then he moved on to the Duke case, where he has proved himself to be either the right’s useful idiot or simply an out and out racist (no matter how loudly he declares himself an Obama supporter). He insists he is not a David-Horowitz wannabe, but then goes on to do interviews with Frontpage, a Horowitz front organization, clearly playing to its Neanderthal audience. Imagine what Johnson would have had to say if it turned out that one of his dreaded 88 – Lubiano, say – had done an interview with the Nation of Islam.

But I suspect he isn’t an idiot but just an old-fashioned racist. What else on earth could account for his obsession with the production of African-American scholars at Duke? (by the way, Lubiano may not have a monograph, but from what I can see her essays have been greatly more influential in her field than Johnson has been in his). Are all the scholars in his department so prolific? I took a look at its web page, and there are many that have nothing, or little, published. David Berger – the prestigious “Broeklundian Professor of History” -- seems to have two books out in the course of a thirty year career, both with vanity presses; Phillip Gallagher and Andrew Mayer, none; and others with one or two, published, mostly it seems, by historical societies.

In one of his many self-serving accounts of his tenure battle, he described Paula Fichtner, his ally, as a “lively and committed scholar” and, elsewhere, one of the “wisest” people had had met in the academy.” Yet when I went to find out how this great historian had transformed her field of East European history in her multi-decade career, I found but two biographies (one published by a vanity press) and only one monograph – a weighty 125 page (notes included) tome on Protestantism and Primogeniture.

All of these field-transforming colleagues of KC Johnson are white, which might explain his silence. Of course, Johnson will say it is politics, not race, that motivates him, that scholars of, say, “Mexican women” shouldn’t be teaching a course on US interventions in Latin America.

But if it is not race-obsession that compels Johnson, then why doesn’t he get riled up over, say, Nial Ferguson, a business school historian (of British colonialism) who was given tenure in the history department at Harvard, and who regularly advances a far-right agenda of US imperialism (Ferguson’s word, not mine) and privatization of Social Security? Honestly, I sympathize with the wrongly accused, of any race, but with a little perspective, isn’t an illegal, destructive war and the gutting of the New Deal a bit more pressing than the Lacrosse case? Or why doesn’t he go after any one of the hacks in the Poli Sci, or Economics, who weigh in on all sorts of policy issues beyond their area of expertise?

We know the answer to this: race sells, and Johnson, though a middling historian, is a good salesman. If he is so concerned with finding justice for the Duke Lacrosse players, then shouldn’t he donate his profits from his book – after he makes the money he spent back – to cover their defense costs? I think we know the answer to that question as well.

[OhIsee]

Mr. Y nails it. KC managed to make an event in another state about him and his crusade against academic projects he dislikes and people (women and minorities) who he believes against all evidence got a free ride. I would dismiss him as a hack if he wasn't something worse: a demagogue.

[Joseph Kugelmass]

Mr. Y: Beautifully done.

[Total]

"who could disagree with that well reasoned point"

Since you failed to even acknowledge Tim Burke's point about academic presses in your own dismissal of them, you should hardly be throwing around witty one sentence retorts. The point is that there is are reasons to publish with particular academic presses, even from a scholar's own institution, and it is rarely because they are acting as semi-vanity presses. If you want to engage with those reasons, more power to you. But blanket assertions of a field about which you are an outsider are rarely convincing.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Mr. Y: "He insists he is not a David-Horowitz wannabe, but then goes on to do interviews with Frontpage, a Horowitz front organization, clearly playing to its Neanderthal audience."

I previously contrasted Johnson with Bauerlein by writing that Bauerlein had written for Frontpage and that KC Johnson hadn't done that. Obviously, I was wrong; KC Johnson is listed as a Frontpage columnist. I was depending on KC Johnson's remark under Horowitz denouncing him; I should have known better than to trust any remark that he makes for accuracy without checking it.

[Ralph Luker]

The monkeys lining up with endorsements of Y's "racist" analysis are fools. KC has endorsed Barak Obama for President, which you'd know if you cared to inform your ignorant selves. Berube and Tim Burke have also been interviewed at Front Page Mag, so they're beyond Rich's lines of acceptable academic behavior, as well.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Are all historians as careless as Ralph? KC Johnson is listed as a columnist, not merely as an interviewee. He has an article about Ward Churchill here.

[Ahistoricality]

Berube and Burke were interviewed by FPM as hostile, in a debate format; Johnson's been interviewed by them because they like what he's saying.

And Johnson keeps repeating that "denounced by Horowitz" line which means that he either doesn't recognize FPM as a Horowitz project (which seems unlikely), doesn't care who publishes or reads his work (which is borderline plausible, given his apparent disintrest in the character of his blog readers we've been trying to discuss), or is trying to evade the point.

Perhaps it would help, as it so often does, if KC would provide some detail on his "denouncement": was it a general statement, a specific incident, or an ongoing dispute?

[Jame Gumb]

What's there to glean from the last few posts?

Mr. Y: an "obsession" with the production of African-American scholars at Duke can only be a thought process from an "old-fashioned racist", etc.

This commentary draws sycophantic praise from a few here, who don't seem able to notice that the dismissal of a large audience of Frontpage readers as "Neanderthals" can only be a thought process from an old-fashioned bigot.

For would-be intellectuals, you sure are a shallow bunch. In contrast, I don't agree with all of SEK's blog, but it's well considered. Mr. Y's admired response is empty noise that wouldn't be out of place on talk radio.

"KC's a racist." This is really your line of attack?

[Anthony Paul Smith]

Actually Mr Y's point seemed less to be that KC Johnson is racist, but rather that for all of Johnson's bluster about what qualifies people as scholars deserving of tenure he doesn't seem to be much up to snuff, a middling scholar who has achieved a low level of fame through scandals. Though he certainly made the racist claim, and it is a claim that should be qualified perhaps by just pointing out his obsession with so-called objective views from no race, it seems not to really be the line of attack. The real question, the one about Johnson's quality as a scholar that would have to be asked would be 'is this true?' Seems plausible to me, but I'm hardly unbiased, so I'm happy just to point out Mr. Y's real line of attack.

It does seem unfortunate that this kind of yellow journalism is what Johnson has turned to now that he's been tenured. I could misunderstand the point of tenure, but I thought its purpose was in part to free a scholar to pursue research that may be controversial, not merely grandstanding. It seems sufficient evidence has been given here to show that Johnson grossly distorts the facts to fit his agenda.

[Mr. Y]

Under the name Robert David Johnson, KC Johnson has published three books -- The Peace Progressives and American Foreign Relations (1995); Ernest Gruening and the American Dissenting Tradition (1998); and Congress and the Cold War (2005). They are journeyman books, nothing to be ashamed of. But they have had zero impact on the field of Diplomatic History. A search of J-Stor (and all the important journals are indexed on that site) reveals, over the last decade, only one instance in which an academic article has referenced a work by Johnson, and then without comment as part of a larger bibliography. He is better known as an editor, having worked with two other scholars to compile LBJ’s presidential recordings. Only one of the three monographs has been published in paperback, a sure sign that they are not being assigned in classes. In fact, I did a survey, albeit informal and not rigorous, of top research schools, and couldn’t find Johnson’s work listed, not even under the “further reading” section, on any diplomatic history syllabi. At Brooklyn College, he has no PhD graduate students, so he can’t influence the field in that way. True, he is affiliated with the Graduate Center, and I’d be curious to know how many students he is working with there – though I see on the web, the majority of his teaching is at the college. So it is understandable his resentment of scholars who he feels are doing less empirically demanding research than he thinks he does, yet get more attention.

And thanks to those who pointed out the difference between being interviewed hostilely by Frontpage, as opposed to Johnson throwing the thugs red meat, either in interview form or as a columnist!

Getting back to Johnson’s unproductive colleagues at Brooklyn College – and a sorry record of publication and scholarship it is indeed -- can one of his defenders tell me why Johnson hasn’t taken them to task for their lack of productivity, for not meeting his standards?

Undoubtedly his defenders will answer that the point on focusing on unproductive Duke scholars is to criticize them for speaking on issues beyond their expertise. But if this is the case, then why introduce the issue of productivity at all, since most of the signers of the much reviled statement are in fact highly productive scholars? What it does have to do with is Johnson’s race-compulsion, since it allows him to introduce the explosive issues of diversity and affirmative action into the debate (and makes him Frontpage’s useful idiot).

Johnson has got away with playing the role of color-blind liberal crusader, concerned with equal rights for all. But why does he never focus on abusers of scholarship who serve power? Sure the humanities has its share of excess, and is tilted to the liberal-left. But poli sci, economics, and public policy departments are filled with much worse, and more powerful, charlatans.

Since Johnson is so concerned with the issue of politicized scholarship, and with academics talking or teaching about things beyond their research, then I’m sure his next crusade will be launched against Donald Kagan and Victor Davis Hanson, two classicists who have Bush's ear and have worked hard to push US foreign policy in a more bellicose direction. Oh, but they aren’t Black.

[JPool]

OK, to be very clear, I agree with SEK and Tim Burke's lines in all this: what ever legitimate greviance Johnson or others might have against the actions of those professors who rushed to judgement in this case, his campaign of character assassination and professional denegration against them does no good and certainly does harm, especially when done in such a sloppy and intellectually dismissive manner.

But for crying out loud, let's not jump in the other direction and endorse Mr. Y's slanderous and inaccurate attack. I don't know from American diplomatic history, but no one I know who does has listed K C Johnson as a middling scholar. I'm not sure what purpose the criticism of Johnson's colleagues at CUNY's publishing records is supposed to serve. If it's meant seriously, then it's just crap. A quick look at the department website reveals that Prof. Berger lists under selected works three books, none published with a "vanity press." If it's satire of Johnson's method, then, as Joseph Kugelmas noted in the other thread, it's not very funny.

[JPool]

OK, Mr Y's and my posts crossed in the ether and this second one is much more reasonable in tone and content. There are clearly some very real racial politics going on here and fueling some people's investment in this case, but it seems overreaching to collapse those motivations back onto Johnson.
From a methodology question, however, the point about why just these professors is entirely appropriate. Tortmaster's earlier notions about Johnson revealing enlightening correlations between those who signed the listening statement and a panopoly of academic "sins" would only be possible to take even slightly seriously in Johnson considered such extraordinary issues as sample size or the possiblility of a control group.

[Timothy Burke]

I think that this kind of status-hierarchy pissing on other people's scholarly work is a nasty practice no matter who is doing it or what direction it's going in. It's one thing to talk this way when you're having a beer at an AHA meeting with some friends. It's another to put this kind of discourse into a public, written context.

I do not object to a detailed critical response to another scholar's published work which focuses on the work. Sometimes very strong criticisms are completely justified, if the methodology is seriously awful or the conclusions completely scurrilous or wrong. I'd hesitate even with that kind of detailed interpretative work to jump to attacking the author's character or their overall profile as scholars.

Sometimes professors take public actions that really discredit them ethically, and it's also justified to criticize those actions. But I can think of quite a few professors who have made total asses out of themselves in public but who are very accomplished scholars nevertheless. Or professors who are in my own personal experience very poor teachers but terrific scholars.

I think it's a professional obligation to compartmentalize these kinds of judgements, and to recognize which of them have a place in legitimate public discussions between or involving academic professionals and which of them belong to the having-a-beer conversation.

In any event, I think academia is way too full of small cruelties and petty status games. You know what? Anybody who writes a couple of monographs is a-ok in my book: I hate the idea of running around saying, "Oh, well, this person got 10 more cites than this person, and that book is taught in five more classes than that book" and trying to build some sort of hierarchy off of that. I'm not happy about some claims that KC has made in this context. I think he's criticizing a group of fellow professionals whose specific actions completely deserve to be attacked, strongly, but then going beyond that to some criticisms that I think aren't just unfair but in some cases incorrect or misleading.

I dislike even more what Mr. Y has said for the same reasons. If Mr. Y wants to make a specific criticism of Johnson's specific scholarly work based on an actual reading of it, go at it. If he can find a major scholar in diplomatic history offering an argument in print about why that work is weak, quote it. Otherwise let's not play these kinds of schoolyard games.

[nigga by another name]

Regarding the racial investment of KC's commenters (and keep in mind that KC must approve of all comments):

"rrhamilton":

It would be a shame if the diversity-racists can shift the focus of this case to a tale of "widespread prosecutorial abuses".

This case happened for one reason: The lying "meta-narrative" that claimed that -- as some point in the mysterious mists of the past -- there was a time when white men commonly raped black women. The lying blood libel against white men was the gasoline that fueled Nifong's prosecution and for so many -- smart and dumb -- people to believe that "something happened".

We will avoid future Tawana and Crystal hoaxes if we can teach ourselves and then younger generations that at all times in American history -- now, during Jim Crow, or during slavery -- the incidence of white-on-black rape was always extremely rare and was always less than the incidence of black-on-white rape.

"Jokingly," I'm sure, "Anonymous":

You honkies has nossin betah to dos dan to bash Mike Nifong?

Honkies be so's preediktible!

"Anonymous" doesn't like "certain people":

I hope he gets years in jail for what he did and for exploiting the feelings of a certain population.

"Anonymous":

When Duke hired Broadhead, they told him they wanted it to become the "Harvard of the South", he thought they said the "Howard of the South."

"Anonymous" think sisters don't bathe:

oh my gosh! Meehan just described pubic combing for debris! Yuk. From a woman who may only bathe once a month --dried semen.

These are the comments KC's actively approving. He sees them in his moderation queue, reads them, thinks them acceptable and posts them to his webpage.

But no, this isn't about KC's racism. Nope. Just the racists he invites over to his house for tea.

[OhIsee]

'Nigga by another name's point is actually a corollary of yours, Tim. KC refuses to educate his audience and to repudiate either their incorrect inferences or inflammatory reactions. In fact, he does something more insidious because he does OK those comments for posting. It reads as if he is letting them say what he won't in the main body of his text. You list your blog under Service on your CV? Where should KC list his blog and interlocutors on his CV? Wherever it is, it'll be a black mark. DiW's libel of scholars is already a blot on his character.

[Mr. Y]

I never said Johnson’s work was weak – I said it was inconsequential. And it’s not about status-hierarchy, or citation counting. It is about trying to understand what would motivate someone like Johnson to try to ruin, or besmirch, the careers of decent, smart people like Wahnema Lubiano and Thavolia Glymph (who if Johnson had done some research would have learned was not a “diversity” hire but a spousal hire, the spouse being Charles Payne, a distinguished historical sociologist who has written widely on the tradition of community organizing in the civil rights movement; does Johnson and his acolytes want to make the case that African-American scholars have been the primary beneficiaries of spousal hires?!!)

Resentment is one motive, since prior to becoming the poster boy for the “angry white male” crowd, Johnson was, in fact, an inconsequential scholar, laboring in anonymity. That is the point of bringing up his stature, or lack of it, in the field of American, or diplomatic history. Racism is another, as is addiction to the kind of attention he wasn’t getting as a scholar. True, perhaps Johnson really is just a crusader; yet his selective method, questionable actions in terms of playing to a racist audience, and compulsive introduction of hot button racial issues requires critical, independent thinkers to question what other motives might be at play.

Also, hasn’t anybody else noticed the irony of a diplomatic historian, whose research focus is on congressional subcommittees and foreign policy, turning himself into a pundit on racial and academic issues, then going on to critisize humanities professors for involving themselves in issues beyond their area of expertise? Imagine the chortle Johnson himself would get from a Duke professor who made as many wild and inflammatory statements about a whole profession based on selected observations from a sample group of 88! It’s a pretty small N.

[Tortmaster]

"These are the comments KC's actively approving. He sees them in his moderation queue, reads them, thinks them acceptable and posts them to his webpage."

That is a lie.

Or, an untruth foisted on this board borne of ignorance. I've posted at D-i-W a few times today and comment moderation was NOT enabled.

Geez, you really crap all over your own arguments when you make up stuff like that. After making picayune arguments about K.C.'s posts, you come over here to tell fabrications. I can see that "Horowitzian" only goes one way to some people.