Wednesday, November 22, 2006

Women's Studies Does Lacrosse

Several days ago, as public criticism of the Group’s action intensified, the Group of 88’s statement mysteriously vanished from the Duke server.

Another interdisciplinary program has stepped into the breach, however, ensuring that anti-team propaganda is readily accessible through a Duke academic website.

The Duke women’s studies program homepage supplies a link to none other than Karla Holloway’s “Bodies of Evidence,” in which the Group of 88 member posited, “White innocence means black guilt. Men’s innocence means women’s guilt.” The logical extension of this argument: the only alternative to condemning black women is to find the lacrosse players guilty, regardless of the lack of evidence against them.

Since “justice,” claimed Holloway, “inevitably has an attendant social construction,” judgments about the lacrosse case “cannot be left to the courtroom.” Instead, it seems, Duke’s women’s studies faculty must serve as the final arbiters of the truth.

The Duke women’s studies program includes 18 faculty members—of whom 13, or 72.2 percent, signed the Group of 88’s statement. The only academic work listed on the program’s homepage is Holloway’s article, which appeared in the summer 2006 edition of Scholar and Feminist Online.

This decision leaves two disconcerting options:

(a) “Bodies of Evidence,” an article published in an obscure journal with little academic standing, constitutes the most distinguished piece of recent scholarship produced by a Duke women’s studies professor.

(b) Program administrators included the link to express solidarity with Holloway’s extremist message.

The women’s studies program, home to less than five percent of the arts and sciences faculty, hosts the chairs of fully half of the Campus Culture Initiative subgroups. In addition to Holloway, who chairs the race subgroup, women’s studies and cultural anthropology professor Anne Allison co-chairs the gender subgroup.

Before the lacrosse case, Allison’s academic reputation came from her moonlighting as a “hostess” to research a book examining what she described as “the Japanese corporate practice of entertaining white collar, male workers in the sexualized atmosphere of hostess clubs.” She then attracted some national attention in 2003, when she violated Duke policy by using University funds to pay for an advertisement criticizing the Bush administration’s foreign policy.

Allison seems not to have learned the lesson about the inappropriateness of mixing academic efforts with her personal political crusades. In spring 2007, this professor—who outlines her research interests as “the ways in which desire seeps into, reconfirms, or reimagines socio-economic relations in various contexts in postwar Japan”—will be co-teaching a course entitled . . . “Hook-Up Culture at Duke.”

As the course introduction explains,

This course, designed as a direct result of events last year on campus, will give students a unique opportunity to examine and reflect upon gendered/sexualized life at Duke in relation to contemporary life in the U.S. We will ask: how has the history of university attendance in the US (in terms of race, class, and gender) impacted campus culture? Are new technologies changing intimate or familial relationships between people? How are distinctions between “at home” and “at work” (or public and private) linked to new kinds of subjectivity and sociality? How do particular bodies gain value in contemporary commodity culture? And finally, what does the lacrosse scandal tell us about power, difference, and raced, classed, gendered and sexed normativity in the US?

Each course unit will include theoretical readings that contextualize Duke campus culture within these larger US cultural and economic formations, emphasizing the ways that “hooking-up” at Duke must be understood in relation to larger intersections of sex, gender, power, and capital. To this end, in addition to theoretical readings, we will also devote a substantial portion of the class to both case studies (drawn from popular media, film, or ethnography) and to Duke-focused student ethnographic research projects.

The goal of the course is two-fold: 1) to understand “hooking-up” at Duke in terms of larger frameworks of race, capitalism/consumerism, class, lifestyle, identity, (hetero)normativity, and power, and 2) to enable students to critically assess both the nature of Duke hook-ups and the institutional setting of Duke itself.

If this course were to constitute a legitimate academic offering, it would have to address—among other items—questions that Allison would prefer to avoid, such as:

  • What does the lacrosse scandal tell us about North Carolina’s excessively broad rape statute, in which demonstrable innocence doesn’t in and of itself constitute grounds for dismissal?
  • What does the lacrosse scandal tell us about racialized politics, and how a district attorney can sell his soul and abandon all legal ethics, pander to a portion of the electorate by appealing to symbolic justice, and gain office?
  • What does the lacrosse scandal tell us about groups like the state NAACP, for whom “difference” is such an important characteristic that due process rights appear to depend on a defendant’s race, class, and gender?
  • And, finally, what does the lacrosse scandal tell us about, to use Allison’s language, “the institutional setting of Duke itself,” a university where 88 professors could sign a rush-to-judgment public denunciation, while the president publicly responded to the arrest of two of his students by telling local business leaders, “If they didn’t do it, whatever they did is bad enough.”

Does anyone seriously believe that Allison’s class will explore these or related questions?

Some students can use “Hook-Up Culture” as part of a year-long seminar featuring Group of 88 members using classes to rationalize their actions of last spring. This semester, Group of 88 members Thavolia Glymph (best remembered for having lamented that things were “moving backwards” when the DNA tests showed no matches to lacrosse players) and Susan Thorne are teaching a class that, according to the syllabus, “emerged out of our discussions of the allegations of sexual assault and racial taunting at the now infamous lacrosse party of March 2006. The criminal charges have not yet been tried in a court of law, but the allegations alone constituted a ‘perfect storm,’ rapidly escalating into a social disaster of extraordinary proportions.”

I asked Thorne why the course’s reading list contained no items on the legal background of Jim Crow justice; or examining, why, in the past if not in the current environment, civil rights groups had championed due process and procedural regularity; or whether Durham authorities had a tradition of overriding civil liberties depending on the political popularity and race/gender of the defendants; or whether some could interpret the real “social disaster of extraordinary proportions” as the extraordinary disregard of due process by Durham’s political and legal elite.

Thorne replied, “While due process is certainly the key issue with respect to the individuals involved, the firestorm generated by the allegations is the result of town gown problems that long predate the incident.”

Civil liberties, it would seem, are not a central concern—either academic or personal—to Duke’s ethnic and women’s studies faculty.

Hat tip: T.D.

53 comments:

Anonymous said...

Do you have a life?

Anonymous said...

To 12:13:

If you know anything about the author, I'm going to assume that you are implying that you're quite impressed. Alternatively, do you?

Anonymous said...

Chicago writes

Having lived in Durham recently for 3 years as a non-Duke student and a supporter of both Duke Athletics and the Univeristy itself, I spent a lot of time both on campus and in Durham. I can not recall one incident of town/gown conflicts outside of friendly banter regarding whether a person is a Duke or UNC sports fan.

I did see a community in which Durham depended on Duke and vice versa. IT saddens me tremendously that people like Nifong and the group of 88 are trying to exploit both Duke and Durham with these allegations for personal gain. These "statements" are ALL addressing their own agenda. In the case of Nifong, it was obviously to get re-elected. In the case of the Group of 88, the motive seems to be different in each case, but rest assured they all have one. KC has done an amazing job exposing them one by one. These accusations are not only regarding the 3 accused lax players, but that Durham and Duke are at war with each other and have been for some time. This is simply not the case and I have the life experience of three years to back it up.

Anonymous said...

At the local community college in my area (a suburb ranked highly in the top 25 places to live in the USA) we have a large assortment of classes that are in place strictly for the housewives with lots of time on their hands. The type of courses that do not apply towards any degree, or even a career outside of the home, mainly just an entertaining way to pass the time for most that attend.

With all I'm reading about the courses offered at Duke, I'm left with the impression there are a tremendous number of classes with similar objectives there.

Anonymous said...

"Theoretical readings?"

As opposed to REAL?

Or "realistic?"

One does not need to search far to know exactly what garbage will be theoretically (er...fantastically) written about Duke and the LAX rape case to superimpose onto a National model of feminism and racism.

Ugh!

Keep exposing them, KC. Duke won't shut them down, but parents might sure shut them out.

Twaddlefree

Anonymous said...

It's shocking to someone who has always respected Duke as a leading academic institution that there so many poorly qualified professors on campus. If you look at the quality of writing and logic, it's rather appalling. Professor Coleman, on the other hand, shows what Duke could be like if it hired more professors like him.

Anonymous said...

I agree completely with the last post. I'm also amazed that there are students at Duke who are willing to waste their time and money on the kind of ludicrous courses described in KC's article. Are these students not planning to seek gainful employment after graduating from Duke? How do they think a prospective employer is going to react to their transcripts, when the employer sees that the student/job applicant spent their college years taking courses on subjects such as "hooking up"?

Anonymous said...

Departments at Duke like Womens' Studies owe their existence to activism. Compare the race/class/gender programs with other academic programs. There was no need for activism to establish a chemistry or physics department. Chemistry professors are expected to publish in reputable and high-quality journals in order to gain tenure and promotions at Duke. Likewise, it USED to be that way in English, and there still are many highly-qualified and legitimately productive English scholars at Duke, although the activists are trying to drown them out.

In the race/class/gender studies departments, however, the entire curriculum is politicized to a point where honest discourse is NOT PERMITTED AND NOT WANTED. Instead, we see "literature" that reads like one of Lenin's political tracts or hear lectures that are caricatures or academic nonsense.

One must remember that these departments MUST have continual "crises" to justify their existence, and the lacrosse case was the target. That it is becoming clear that the Duke 3 raped no one only makes people like Karla Holloway even more angry and more loud. Thus, people like Holloway and Grant Farred and others must bang the drums and insist that the lacrosse players created a crisis situation.

Actually, what they did was have a party that pretty much was a bust, and what went on most likely was much more tame than what goes on at other parties at Duke. But the lacrosse players became the perfect people for the Evil Gang of 88 to demonize, and they went to work.

As for Duke's campus initiatives, the only initiatives worth having are those that call for getting rid of these bogus "studies" departments. Because of the activist and political nature of the programs and their curricula, it is IMPOSSIBLE to reform them. One cannot hold them to standards of academic rigor that others at Duke face because there is nothing rigorous about the thinking that accompanies such programs.

Thank you, K.C., for further exposing the fraudulent nature of these programs and of the "literature" that these programs produce.

Anonymous said...

With all of the talk lately of adding "hook up" classes to the Duke curriculum, it makes one wonder of the women's studies department is nothing more than a herd of highly educated voyeurs.

Anonymous said...

Again and again, the game is, IF you display the correct politically signifying attributes, then your behavior and expressions of self are part of a large and noble narrative-- IF you do not display attributes signifying correct affinity, then your behavior and expressions of self are evidence of your beastly, base and ugly tendencies. I think it may be a weird postmodern tribal coalescence in place of former cultural and religious structures. Flannery O'Connor is said to have remarked to a fellow Southerner at a party in NYC, "But these people aren't from anywhere." To which we might add, "And they don't believe in anything, except the ideas they make up." sic semper tyrannis

Anonymous said...

With my son being a Marquette U athlete, my support for the Duke three waivered a bit last night, however by the end of the game I was back on board...

In KC's original post he ponders NC's 'broad' rape laws. I think with Nifong, you could have the tightest rape laws in the US, but he would simply ignore them as he has done with most of the laws and ethics that apply to this case. You've seen the phrase "Guns don't kill people..people do." Same concept here. A good law in the hands of a bad prosecutor is the problem here.

Anonymous said...

I was struck in looking at the party footage in the 60 Minutes piece at how lame the party looked. What horrible irony was the result.

The "White innocence = Black guilt" comment probably accurately reflects how many people see this case. Since it is just one person's word against several others', if the (white) defendants are innocent then the (black) woman is a liar of criminal proportions. Those who see the world in group think have difficulty believing that in a racial and sexual divide the person in their own group would lie. However, when the two antagonists are of the same sex and race, the group think dynamic doesn't exist and a black woman can be seen as lying.

Maybe I need to take that "Hooking Up..." class since I don't get the connection between the hook up culture and capitalsism. I do think the current young men/women dynamics-- away from individual dating and toward group functions, with the attendant "hooking up" following a group function being the main way of connecting sexually, is something worthy of dicusssion and examination. To bring class and racial conflict to that examination seems completely ludicrous.

Anonymous said...

Your academic dishonest continues to run amok. Read the text people. I had to go to the link to find out what Holloway said and found that your failure to quote the entire context allows you to continue this pretense. Here's the actual text. Explain to the rest of us Duke parents, who are grateful there are faculty like Farred and Holloway to teach our students. I've asked my daughter to look for these classes even if it is her last semester. And by the way, if you follow the links for these professors, you will find numerous books and articles. At least be honest people. You can disagree with them, but your quotes out of context betray your biases. From what the full quote says, your web site indicates Holloway is absolutely right. I have written the president to thank him for having people like her on the faculty.

"In nearly every social context that emerged following the team's crude conduct, innocence and guilt have been assessed through a metric of race and gender. White innocence means black guilt. Men's innocence means women's guilt. These capacious categories, which were in absolute play the night of the team's drunken debacle, continue their hold on the campus and the Durham community."

Tell us what is incorrect there?

Anonymous said...

to 9:54 AM,
It appears you are another one on board with those folks who think that because the boys had a raucuos party and were drinking, they should face trial and conviction for rape.

Pretty sick attitude...

If you are encouraging your daughter to take classes from these clowns, it is apparent that she will not need employment if she graduates.

Greg Toombs said...

Anonymous 9:54 is a baiter... clearly not someone who has followed this blog closely. Otherwise it would know that Holloway's article has been printed and dissected in full. The post is pretty funny in that light.

Besides, what could be better than linking directly so we can read an unfiltered academic disaster for ourselves.

Thanks to KC for shining sunlight where the sun don't usually shine.

Anonymous said...

9:54,

Please note Robertson Scholars (UNC students allowed to attend Duke) are no longer allowed to sit in the duke student section for home basketball games. Since you're obviously a UNC fan (poser) we need to remind you that you're not welcome in "our house"!

Anonymous said...

tombz is correct. 9:54 is a 'baiter'...and a 'master' at it as well!

Anonymous said...

9:54
With a touch of generalization, you can apply any agenda you desire to this case.

Maybe you should look into a few semesters of courses in the 'Karla Dept.' for YOUR daughter.

Off topic, what did your daughter do to upset you?

Anonymous said...

For all you idiots who want the readers to think these professors don't publish, I suggest you read what anybody with an interest in facts rather than fiction can get from the Duke website. Holloway's extensive publications including six books and essays in The American Journal of Bioethics. So the idea of obscure journals and the only thing they write doesn't seem too shabby to me. How does that compare to you people? The question is, why can't you produce a criticism that deals with the facts? Perhaps because the facts of their academic stature interferes with the fiction of your wishful thinking. For those who aren't confused by truth, here's the link:
http://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/English/faculty/karla.holloway

Anonymous said...

KC, I feel your insuation that Karla Holloway published bodies of evidence in the Scholar and Feminist Online to somehow keep it secret was an intentional distortion of fact. In a male dominated culture these views cannot get a larger forum. The Duke Chronicle should publish this "Piece Of Scholarship" in it's entirety to insure it gets the attention it deserves. I would also propose that any Duke student who demonstrates racial or cultural insensitivity should be forced to read Karla Holloway's lamentably underapriciated Codes of Conduct (Amazon.com sales rank #1,671,583) as punishment.

Sunshine is the best disinfectant---Louis Brandeis

Anonymous said...

Why not tell your 'precious' daughter to take this course from Holloway. It sounds like a real winner--but probably, like the title it's all in her imagination.

381. Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Instructor K. Holloway

This is a course in U.S. Literature that interrogates the premise and argument of Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark. What is the effect of America's racial history on its literature of the 19th and 20th centuries? Is race a metaphor that explores and exposes an Africanist presence that excavates American literature's obsessions with individualism, innocence, and masculinity?

Morrison's slim but rich and deeply provocative text will form the center of our discussions. Then we will read Melville, Henry James, Twain, Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, O'Connor, Poe and Faulkner, considering the way in which we might discover a critical geography of race in American fiction.

Greg Toombs said...

Anon 10:31, re: Holloway specifically,

Having read her article, I've already wasted too much of my lifetime to wade through another swamp of impenetrable blather.

Based on that one reading, she blends a poisonous mix of bad writing, low scholarship and a hostile PC agenda.

I'd rather watch puppies in a blender than read more of her stuff.

AMac said...

Having read about the Duke Lacrosse Rape Hoax for a couple of weeks now, what becomes an increasingly difficult task is keeping the exclamation point at the end of the thought, "D.A. Nifong's enablers have no shame!"

K.C. Johnson deserves a great deal of praise for allowing so many prominent individuals to speak to a wide audience in their own authentic voices. By the standards of professional integrity, decency, consistency, and honesty, many of the people who K.C. Johnson quotes and links damn themselves by their own words.

Repeatedly and -- often enough -- with overweening pride.

For the sake of the Duke undergrad who decides to fritter his/her time and family wealth on the lightweight Cultural Anthropology 180-04, I hope Professor Allison adds Tom Wolfe to that course's syllabus. Here is Steve Sailer, writing about the connection between Wolfe and the Hoax in early April:

--[begin quote]--

Once again we see from the media's frenzied hunt for the Great White Defendant (to use Wolfe's term from 1987's Bonfire of the Vanities)... that what white Americans really like is sticking it to other white Americans. As Wolfe pointed out in his description of the New York City district attorney's office, white Americans find the transgressions of African Americans and Hispanics to be depressing and boring, in large part because whites see themselves (condescendingly) not as being in status competition with minorities, just with other whites. This is not because white people hate white people as a whole, just other white people they are competing with for status. The Duke lacrosse team, a bunch of rich preppie jerks, makes a wonderful target for other whites wishing to parade their moral superiority.

--[end quote]--

"Rich preppie jerks" need not be an accurate description of the three indicted men for Sailer's point to ring true. It is sufficient for that characterization to be superficially plausible.

In another piece, Sailer links to a 2004 essay in the Herald-Sun by now-retired Geology professor Stuart Rojstaczer. Rojstaczer comments acidly on Wolfe's portrait of Duke:

--[begin quote]--

[The characters in "I am Charlotte Simmons] are not the wide-spectrum of students at Duke... we don't see the eager pre-meds, the granolas, the engineers, the students who want to go on to graduate school and become academics, the just plain serious students, and those who go to the Chapel every Sunday.

Tom Wolfe focuses on the "pond scum" of Duke's campus. Dumb racist jocks, misogynistic frat boys, submissive/catty sorority girls, and arrogant and insecure academic achievers inhabit Wolfe's Duke. Wolfe's characters are vain, obsessed with status, and while generally gorgeous on the outside, are very ugly on the inside...

How real is Wolfe's Duke? For that slice of the Duke undergraduate body that is represented by Wolfe, I'd say it's very real... Wolfe's Duke is a dead on accurate description of about one-third of Duke's student population...

But what about the other two-thirds? Included in that two-thirds are decent human beings. Included in that two-thirds are students who care about the classes they take.

--[End quote]--

The schadenfreude-laced delight of the Holloways, Crowleys, and Allisons of the faculty:

* That the lacrosse team sits squarely in Rojstaczer's one-third;

* That the three accused men personify this aspect of Duke student culture;

* That, therefore, these three men deserve to be charged, tried, and convicted, irrespective of considerations of evidence, due process, or equal treatment.

Between them, Sailer and Wolfe explain a great deal of the behavior that KC Johnson has documented.

Anonymous said...

To Anon 10:31

KC said "the only academic work listed on the departments homepage is Holloway's article" not Holloway doen't publish. This was a deliberate distortion on your part. You should read Holloway's "The "R" Word: Bioethics and a (Dis)Regard of Race." American Journal of Bioethics 6:3 (2006). ten times as penance.

To Tombz
I'd rather stick my hand in a blender than read more of this stuff.

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Anonymous said...

interesting that holloway doesn't list her undergraduate school on duke website

she went to talladega college, a 3d tier school--no data on sat scores, but to get a "scholarship," u need 1000 on the recentered sat

am i the only 1 who finds this humorous?

AMac said...

Anon 11:43am --

People can espouse "Bad Philosophy" and the social constructs of the Hard Left without being "stupid," "bottom 5%," "minority," or falling into any other bin.

For that matter, smart people are particularly good at constructing elaborate theories.

Better to examine the ideas as ideas. KC Johnson himself is the poster child for taking this approach to the Lacrosse Rape Hoax.

Framing disputes in the most personal of terms is a good way to provoke a flame war. Is that your intention?

Anonymous said...

12:18--it's true that john dewey, karl marx, and rousseau are no longer relevant, but at least they were brilliant and could write well-argued prose, and i'd welcome their ilk into the university i'd create, if it were in my power--i didn't much care for duke's stanley fish, but i RESPECTED him--on the other hand, the k holloways and h bakers are embarrassments forced upon elite schools because of racial quotas

i see nothing wrong in pointing out that the stupidest people on elite campuses are either black or hispanic, the principal recipients of HUGE preferences we so casually refer to as "affirmative action"--we now live in a fascist world where standards are topsy-turvy

do i want a flame war? if it means telling the truth about 'spreferences, then yes--let's
get it on

kcjohnson9 said...

It's worth noting on this point that Anne Allison, the main subject of this post, is white; and that the clearest voice from Duke throughout this controversy has come from an African-American, James Coleman.

There is no clear racial breakdown to the faculty who have acted in an inappropriate manner in this controversy. Holloway, Baker, and Lubiano are black. Allison, Chafe, Wood, and Starn are white.

Anonymous said...

As I look at the post by 9:54, I cannot help but wonder if this person is serious. Again, let us look at what the person said:

"In nearly every social context that emerged following the team's crude conduct, innocence and guilt have been assessed through a metric of race and gender. White innocence means black guilt. Men's innocence means women's guilt. These capacious categories, which were in absolute play the night of the team's drunken debacle, continue their hold on the campus and the Durham community."

Tell us what is incorrect there?

If, as Holloway writes, that this MUST be "assessed" through the race/gender "matrix," what she really is saying that what actually occurred does not matter. Yes, the young men are charged with a specific crime, but it does not matter if they engaged in that specific act. They are white, the accuser is black, so, THEREFORE, the men are guilty and should go to prison.

If we are to examine reality through an unreal matrix, then all I can say is that Holloway and the 9:54 poster do not have the intellectual tools to say that Jim Crow Justice was wrong.

After all, the jurors in the Scottsboro Boys Trial looked through the "matrix of race and gender" and concluded that the defendants were guilty. Holloway and the poster want us to do the same thing, except reverse the racial positions. If, as she puts it, "white innocence means black guilt," then the reverse also would have to be true.

Thus, according to Holloway's "logic," the jurors in the Scottsboro Boys Trial came to the right conclusion. Now, in an historical context we see this particular trial and conviction in Scottsboro as a massive injustice. But Holloway is not free to argue that Scottsboro was wrong and Durham is right.

While 9:54 agrees with Holloway, I would ask this person if her child was accused of a specific crime that she did not commit, would she be saying "Actual events do not matter. Only the matrix of race and gender matter," and if she is on the "wrong side" of the equation, then she is guilty? No, I think we would then see this person abandoning the Holloway deconstructionist nonsense.

Anonymous said...

So 12:06, Auburn university is ranked 88th (2007 data) among national universites in US News, where KC received his doctorate.Economics, his PhD department, is listed 123rd. So help us understand what information these rankings give us about faculty in these blogs?

Anonymous said...

KC,

I agree in principle with Anon 12:36 though fully accept your last comment. My belief is that we cannot use Anon 12:36's guidelines as absolutes, though they are just that, guidelines in our current milieu. There is no shortage of white idiots in the university settings. Most of them fall into these "low IQ" fields anyway. The bottom line is that we need to get rid of these "low IQ" departments because they are nothing but a magnet for idiots. White or black, though if we want to be accurate, more black than white.

Anonymous said...

not buying that argument, kc

"conservative" affirmative action recipients are also legion--eg, john mcwhorter, shelby steele (what exactly has he published that is original scholarship?)

i'm talking about averages--if anyone wants to read a study on the effects of "diversity" on elite institutions, visit The Public Interest site--forgot the name of syudy but u should hv no trouble finding it--believe it was cowritten by 3 authors--everyone on this site should read it just as all should read charles murray's brilliant essay, "the inequality taboo"

kcjohnson9 said...

To the 1.00:

I'm not sure where you heard that I have an economics Ph.D. from Auburn.

I actually have a history Ph.D. from Harvard. I don't have the US News rankings in front of me, but I believe it ranks a bit higher than 123rd.

Anonymous said...

> “the ways in which desire seeps into, reconfirms, or reimagines socio-economic relations in various contexts in postwar Japan”

This gets you a professorship at Duke? Wow. Just wow.

Anonymous said...

Actually, I am the one with the Economics Ph.D. from Auburn. Our doctoral program was terminated in 1999 due to a split on the Auburn board of trustees. We had done well in placement of our graduates, but the political nature of the split had nothing to do with academic performance.

While I was there, our department had a higher ranking, and a number of my professors had published in top-tier journals and had a good reputation. Of course, the poster is trying to say that since my doctorate is from Auburn, then I cannot possibly know of what I speak. That is his opinion, but if the person is trying to make intelligent statements, then perhaps he should get the names correct.

K.C. received his doctorate in history from Harvard, and while there he was a TA to one of my friends, Tom Woods, who received his bachelor's degree at Harvard and his doctorate at Columbia.

I do not pretend to match K.C. in academic accomplishments, but even though I have been teaching only seven years, I have a decent publishing vita myself. You can go to Google Scholar and see a number of my academic publications.

This discussion, however, is NOT about academic credentials. It is about faux academics trying to say that three young men are guilty of rape even if they are not guilty of rape. Just because someone with an advanced degree in Womens's Studies says the young men are guilty does not make them guilty.

So, post all the insults you wish, but in the end we still are dealing with this thing called truth. Either the evidence shows rape, or it does not. None of the other academic double-speak can change that fact.

Anonymous said...

9:23am-You had to go there about last night didn't you!!! ;)

Congrats to Marquette, they looked great. We will be ready if we meet again in the tourney.

Anonymous said...

There is something else that those who write the insults need to know: I am perfectly happy with where I received my doctorate, and I am perfectly happy at the True FSU. I feel privileged to have gone through a program that first and foremost emphasized economics (as opposed to mathematical modeling for its own sake), and I was able to sit in classrooms with some excellent economists who also were good teachers.

As for being at Frostburg, it has been a good place for me to work, and Cumberland (where I live) has provided a wonderful atmosphere for my family. In other words, you need to go after what I write, not where I went to school or where I work.

Anonymous said...

auburn is a good school, and judging fron his good writing, i doubt professor anderson is an affirmative case

i went to graduate school at harvard, wisconsin, and texas--and imo the last 2 are in many ways superior to harvard

here's something no one has touched on:

which groups are most victimized by the preciouses of the world?

i don't have the data, but my best guess would be hispanic and black men: these groups should not be supporting dear precious

some criminologists believe that as many as 59% of rape allegations are false reports

Anonymous said...

above typo: correct fig is 50%

Anonymous said...

what doofus called auburn an inferior university with an 88 rank? it's a 1st tier univ, doofus

someone tell jason that world view is 2 words

Anonymous said...

I wonder if Holloway's statement is observational, not a statement of her beliefs:

"In nearly every social context that emerged following the team's crude conduct, innocence and guilt have been assessed through a metric of race and gender. White innocence means black guilt. Men's innocence means women's guilt. These capacious categories, which were in absolute play the night of the team's drunken debacle, continue their hold on the campus and the Durham community."

Unfortunately, the first sentence is in passive voice; so it's not clear who is doing the "assessing". If you interpret it that the Duke/Durham community at large is viewing the incident through the race/sex lens, then the follow-up, rather inflammatory, statements (e.g. "White innocence means black guilt.") can be read as re-statements of what the community at large is apparently thinking, not Holloway herself.

I'm not a fan of Holloway or her writing style, but there might be a misunderstanding here.... Actually, I might be a fan of hers if she (and her ilk) were a bit more clear about what they are trying to say. I'm a engineering sort of guy, so I need concrete examples and concrete (recommended) solutions....

Anonymous said...

don't look for too much meaning from the likes of holloway

here in manhattan--guarantee it--any bar u go to will have smarter bartenders--she's stupid, bub, so your analysis of her "writing" is wasted space

Anonymous said...

A comment about women's studies and other "wastes" of tuition dollars. A lot of people taking these classes are minoring in the subject or majoring in something else too. They're taking the classes because they find them interesting, not for their economic value. I minored in History for the same reason.

More importantly, unless you're a scientist or a business major, does it really matter what major in?

Prof. Anderson, I can't imagine that the majority of your students go on to become professional economists, do they? Most probably work in business or finance.

And KC, how many of your students go onto become professional historians? 1 in 10? less?

Do either of you feel like that somehow negates the value of what your students learn in your classes? I would hope not.

Your students are learning a lot more than just the subject matter of any given class. I think many of those same lessons can be taught in "softer" majors as well. You still have write well to earn a good grade on an essay, you still have to synthesize tons of information to write a research paper, and you still have to push yourself to understand really abstract and convoluted theories (as has been noted on this blog, a lot of the academic writing is mindnumbingly dense - even if uneccessarily so).

Even if the. Underlying subject matter is crap, the skills needed to understand and write about it are far from worthless.

Anonymous said...

Here is the problem: if one cannot engage in rational analysis, then all the writing skills in the world are useless -- unless one lands a job as a professor in a race/class/gender department. The material that is taught in these kinds of departments is more reminiscent of a Lenin propaganda track than anything resembling academic rigor.

Have you ever examined the curriculum from these departments? All of it is based upon hatred of people of other groups, and the emphasis that some people are such "victims" that no matter what path they take in life, the circumstances always will defeat them.

Does it not seem strange to you that the people who are declaring that the Duke 3 are "racist criminals" also admit that most likely no rape took place? Would you want someone advocating that you be tried for what used to be a capital crime simply because of the color of your skin or your particular physical makeup? Even if you did not commit the crime for which you are charged?

So, yes, I do have a problem with "academic" departments that employ people who simply call for railroading of innocent people to prison. If you do not have a problem with this, then Lord help you.

Anonymous said...

4:11: my poor misguided lad:

your grammar is atrocious: you should have taken a minor in composition, an imprtant life skill

2 winners on your post:

1. you use "less" instead of the correct "fewer"

2. eithet takes a singular verb, so it's "does," not do

i could do the same thing to the affirmative action contingent--are u 1 of its members?

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Anonymous said...

Does the Duke Woman's Studies Department have any evidence showing that a rape occured at 610 on the night of 13/14 March 2006?

kcjohnson9 said...

If they do, it would seem vital that they share this information with Nifong . . .

Anonymous said...

KC,

Allison's reputation is not solely based on Nightwork, though that was groundbreaking work of the best sort, but on multiple books (and articles) which bridge the anthropology-cultural history divide and which have substantially reenergized the field. Not singlehandedly, perhaps, but she's a serious scholar who deserves a little more consideration than you're giving her.

Anonymous said...

Sign up now...
'...We call our planned event for March 2007 a workshop to foreground our interest in feminist theory as a scholarly domain of inquiry. Therefore, in keeping with the interdisciplinary impulse central to Women's Studies as a field, we will resist consolidating feminist theory into a canon of great works or privileged authors, or prioritizing it as a specific kind of methodological project. The Workshop will be organized pedagogically to promote intense study, featuring both keynote lectures by internationally known scholars and small working seminars for participants.
Feminist Theory Workshop.....
Duke University
Sanford Institute of Public Policy
240 Science Drive
Duke University
Durham, NC 27706
USA'