My Final Statement on KC Johnson's Until Proven Innocent; or, You Know You've Made It ...

(By the way, I lied .)

... when The Weekly Standard smears you:

And, just a few days ago, Group of 88 sympathizer Scott Eric Kaufman, a journalism instructor at the University of California at Irvine, posted an entry on his blog, Acephalous, calling for Johnson to be ostracized by the prestigious history website Cliopatria, even though Johnson has a doctorate from Harvard and is the author of four scholarly books.

I'm a what?  Group of 88 sympathizer?  News to me.  Also quite nice to be reemployed: I loved my time working in the literary journalism department, and wish that University of California regulations would have let me keep teaching in it. 

As for the (oft-repeated) claim that I called for KC Johnson's ouster from a group blog to which I don't contribute, I offer my (oft-repeated) explanation:

KC: 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.

Also:

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. 

So kudos to Charlotte Allen for landing her review of Until Proven Innocent in The Weekly Standard.  Perhaps next time she (or her fact-checkers) will verify the accuracy of her statements before they're published.  (Fact-checking is something of a sport at the Standard, after all.)

UPDATE: Ralph thinks I ought to own up to my words and admit I called for KC to be barred from Cliopatria.  As I meant nothing of the sort, honesty bars me from doing that.  What I can say is that I don't think KC should be barred from Cliopatria or otherwise ostracized by the academic community (online or otherwise). 

Comments

[Rich Puchalsky]

Tortmaster, I accept that you've read the actual statement. That puts you ahead of certain other people, probably. But you're not addressing the critical problem with KC Johnson's reading, the fact that he asserts that the statement prejudges the guilt of the students. I address this point here, if you missed it.

And you still are misreading wildly. You write that "I think the ad was well-crafted to tacitly, yet obviously, refer to the rape as basically well-established fact." There is no reason why the statement would have included quotes like "If the students are guilty, they should be expelled" if this were true. Actually, rather than have me repeat all of this again, just go read the comment I linked to above.

I'll try to explain to you one more time, with an over-the-top example that should suit your lets-look-at-everything-through-the-60s biases. Imagine that it's the time of the Watts riots Watts riots, and a group issued a statement that said "Burn, baby, burn". Let's say they even mentioned the traffic stop. Does this mean that they are asserting that Marquette Frye was innocent? No, it means that they acknowledge that the community has become mobilized around a particular flashpoint, and that they think that ongoing racism is a sufficient reason to encourage more protest rather than less, in an attempt to force society to address these concerns. The particular flashpoint is not really the main consideration.

I realize that by using this example, I'm inviting wingnuts to misrepresent what I wrote. (No doubt Prof. Ethan will lead off with "Rich Puchalsky characterized the Group of 88 as writing 'Burn, baby, burn'!") Of course I'm not doing that, and I preemptively denounce any such unethical and stupid misuse of my words. The Group was not calling for anyone to be castrated, or any of the other ridiculous BS that KC Johnson pulled from rumor and maybe a picture of some freshman's sign.

Nor was, really, a call for protest the major focus of the ad. The major focus was on pointing out that this was a social disaster, which it was for Duke, just as the Watts Riots were for L.A., whatever the cause. The ad was supposed to tell people that racism was common on campus, that black people had to deal with it day by day even if white people could ignore it, and that those ongoing circumstances were what led to events like the lacrosse incident becoming social disasters.

So, Tortmaster, for your points A-H I'd say that perhaps A-D have some validity -- not that I necessarily agree with them, but they at least have some basis in what the statement actually said and are arguable. E. doesn't, if "rushing to judgement" means "rushing to judgement of the three accused students." F. doesn't, for the same reason. G. doesn't, because I fail to see what scholarship has to do with the whole matter; this appears to me to be a fully political statement. H., no, they were commenting on the situation catalysed by the lacrosse incident, not on the lacrosse team.

Now, do I want to argue with you over A-D? Not really, I wouldn't have signed the statement either, so I suspect that we'd be arguing at the margins. But I do want to pull you back to reality. KC Johnson has evidently influenced people like you and like Ralph Luker above to assert confidently that the statement prejudged the guilt of the three students. That is a misrepresentation, and it's a race-baiting misrepresentation. As I've said before, I think that it's at least as bad as anything the Group did, and possibly, due to KC Johnson's wingnut media connections, worse.

[Karl Steel]

SEK: re, "outing." If that's directed at me, that wasn't my intent in asking Prof. Ethan where he works or what kind of work he does. Since Ethan is portraying himself as a "prof," I just wanted to get a better sense of his investment in this argument. I've a sense of where Luker is coming from, the importance of the work he's done to date (quite important), and so forth. I apologize if I came off as threatening to out someone (I couldn't: I don't know Ethan from Adam, and I haven't tried to track him down), so I'll be more careful in the future.

Karl Steel first expressed doubts that the rape of the *female student* is the sign of any systemic problem

Dude, that's not what I said. Once more, "Then of course there's the question whether or not the Feb 2007 case represents (which word is, of course, precisely the knotty problem that led to this whole mess) a systemic problem re: social justice and race."

Of course any rape represents some kind of systemic problem. That's what I said later on. "Some" does not equal "any." Right? My question was this: A, the problem of representation (of an individual to a group, certainly a problem you could do more to think about); and B, whether the 2007 case could be thought to represent problems concerning social justice and rape. To determine B well, one has to investigate the problem of representation itself. You know who's good at studying representation? People in the humanities. And statisticians, I guess. I'm not expressing doubts; I'm proposing a site of investigation. You know, something academics do. Call it a professional tic.

I'm done with you Ethan. There's few things that get my goat worse than being misrepresented, and you just keep misrepresenting me: either you're a bad, bad reader, or you're arguing in bad faith. I'm beginning to suspect it's some combination of the two (and, yes, there are other possibilities, but the possibility of "Ethan has correctly represented KS" is not one of them). A mensch would apologize.

(AMAC: I'm unconvinced of the significance of Volokh's recantation of his position on torture. The fact that a person of his professional stature should devote professional writing to promoting torture evidences a kind of soul-sickness. In other words, I don't care if he changed his mind because the fact that he had to change his mind is a deal-breaking problem in itself, so far as I'm concerned. Sort of like Andrew Sullivan's fifth column crack. Doesn't matter to me how much he's disappointed in his messiah. shame should have driven him into silence)

[Karl Steel]

social justice and rape

er, "race."

BTW, does anyone know what Atrios is reference with this:

But, in any case, Instahack and the rest of the Bush sycophants declared us ¨objectively pro-Saddam.¨ The supposedly level-headed Eugene Volokh wrote ¨future history¨piece in which appeasers like me won and Saddam blows up a major American city or two.

I can't seem to track it down.

[SEK]

Karl, that wasn't aimed at you: someone posted Prof. Ethan's identity yesterday, and I deleted it. Asking someone to reveal their identity is fine; doing it for them, that's what's unacceptable.

[AMac]

Karl Steel 9:11am --

In re: Volokh--you commented on that blog's credibility by offering readers a link to a 3/16/05 alicublog post that quotes Volokh and notes:

These are the words of right-wing legal eagle Eugene Volokh, whose sadism is excited by the Iranian mullahs’ decidedly pre-Enlightenment idea of justice.

Fair enough. I thought it noteworthy that Volokh changed his mind on the subject three days later, writing

Mark Kleiman's Extremely Sensible Post Has Persuaded Me...Part of me wishes that I could keep disagreeing, out of sheer bullheadedness. But the fact is that he's right, and I was wrong.

Some people consider admitting error (when warranted) and then publicly changing one's position to be a good thing. Acephalous readers who only went so far as to click on your link to alicublog would have missed that context.

[Karl Steel]

someone posted Prof. Ethan's identity yesterday, and I deleted it

Oh, that's nasty.

Acephalous readers who only went so far as to click on your link to alicublog would have missed that context.

Absolutely right: my mistake.

[Tortmaster]

A few comments about the copyright issue. Disclaimer: I have only had two cases dealing with copyright law, both involving the defense of alleged infringers from the evil CCC. I represented two campus copy shops putting together packets for students. Sticky issues, those. I am not close to being an expert, though. I will divide my analysis in two parts:

I. PRACTICAL

An on-line search for lawsuits involving copyright violations for the posting of "private" e-mails turned up exactly zero (0) cases. When you think about it, there are copyright violations going on by the trillions every day. From Aunt Gladys forwarding an email to other technical violations. In fact, you are technically violating my copyright this second. Your computer's RAM has just made a copy of this post.

Also, I doubt that the issue of permission, express or implied has been explored thoroughly. It seems that Baker's email was in response to an email from a lacrosse student's parent to all members of the Gang of 88. It would seem logical that Baker sent his response to the parent and the 87 other members. Could Baker have told the parent or the others to disseminate his email? In a subsequent email? Could Baker have told K.C. to publish it? Did K.C. email Baker with a request for comment? The final practical observation is that Baker has not filed suit, even though he has, in this matter, threatened to file a "class action" against various enemies.

II. LEGAL

Ralph Luker's suggestion of "fair use" appears to be controlling to me. Fair use doesn't just mean using a snippet of the material. It also includes journalism, parody and social commentary exceptions. Parody (even self-parody) is a possibility; social commentary and journalism are certainties.

Baker wrote about "a scummy bunch of white males" and "'a bunch of farm animals.'” He also wrote to the lacrosse parent: "I really hope whoever sent this stupid farce of an email rots in .... umhappy" and "forgive me if you really are, quite sadly, mother of a “'farm animal.'"

After the Baker email, K.C. Johnson wrote: "So speaks 'one of the most wide-ranging intellectuals in America today in any field of the humanities,'” which is a quote from the Vanderbilt English Department Chair. Journalism and biting social commentary if you ask me.

Another issue is whether the piece even meets the definition of a literary work. Would Houston Baker claim it as a literary work? In my opinion, the work is hate speech and the author was not right at the time of authorship. I do not see it being seriously considered in any compendium of Baker's work. This leads to the another, separate question: What commercial value to ascribe to that email? MOO! Gregory