Professor Hattery Analyzes the Lacrosse Case

Angela Hattery is a professor at George Mason University, where she serves as the associate director of the school’s Center for Women and Gender Studies. (This semester, she’s teaching a course in theoretical perspectives in women and gender studies.) She came to George Mason from Wake Forest, a North Carolina university around 75 miles from Duke, where she also taught gender studies classes. She said that she came to GMU because she “liked the diversity and the way the program integrates not just gender issues but race and ethnicity as well.” Her research interests? “The intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality.” 

Of course.

Professor Hattery recently decided to offer her insights on the Duke lacrosse case. She penned a post entitled, “Rape in High School and College Athletics: Why do we settle for the explanation that boys will simply be boys?”

The post touches on five cases: the Glen Ridge (NJ) rape by members of the high school football team; the Steubenville (OH) alleged rape by high school football players, in which two players have been charged and await trial in juvenile court; the Kobe Bryant rape allegations, in which charges against Bryant were dropped but a civil claim was settled; an allegation that two former Wake Forest basketball players (who were never charged) raped a fellow student; and the Duke lacrosse case.

The Kobe Bryant case occurred when Bryant was a member of the Los Angeles Lakers, a professional basketball team; Hattery does not explain its relevance to a post about “rape in high school and college athletics.”

Just how similar to the Duke case are the other three cases? The Wake Forest case (to which Hattery provided a link to an interview with the accuser) involved an allegation of acquaintance rape, in which the accuser leveled her allegations two months after the alleged incident; the basketball players claimed that the sexual intercourse was consensual but never denied all sexual contact. In the Duke case, of course, the lacrosse players consistently claimed that never was any intercourse of any type, and DNA tests corroborated their assertions.

In the Glen Ridge case, four men were convicted of sexual assault. In the Duke case, of course, the attorney general issued a report indicating that the accused students were wholly innocent.

In the Steubenville case, there appears to be very strong evidence that a crime occurred (based in part through on social-media accounts by the alleged perpetrators and their friends), and a special prosecutor was appointed because of concerns that the local law enforcement was too lenient and sympathetic towards the alleged perpetrators. In the Duke case, of course, there was no evidence a crime occurred, and the original law enforcement reaction was (unethically) too harsh and unsympathetic towards the alleged perpetrators.

Hattery attempts to slide past these pretty significant distinctions between the lacrosse case and her other examples by offering what she terms a “caveat”: that “some of the events and cases I’m going to highlight did not ultimately end up generating criminal charges and in some cases trials failed to garner a conviction. It’s not the legal outcomes that are my concern.” Yet the title of her post is “Rape in High School and College Athletics,” not “Allegations of Rape against High School or College Athletes.” Hattery does not reveal how she concluded that a “rape” had occurred in cases in which trials or legal investigations “failed to garner a conviction”—or much less, as in the Duke case, yielded a finding of actual innocence.

Professor Hattery offers two insights about the lacrosse case. First, after taking note of the outrage following “a youtube video of a young man from Steubenville talking about the [alleged] victim as being “dead as a doornail,” she muses, “I wonder what we would have seen if a cell phone user had videotaped the strippers the night of March 13, 2006 at the Duke lacrosse house. Would we have had a similar response?”

The (unstated) implication: contemporaneous cell-phone activity in the lacrosse case would have revealed untoward activity.

Hattery didn’t provide a link to her question about the Duke case—perhaps she was unaware that the contemporaneous material from “cell phone user[s]” regarding the strippers didn’t exactly support her insinuation. And while at Steubenville the cell-phone evidence to which Hattery did provide a link bolstered the accuser’s claims, at Duke, the cell-phone photos to which Hattery did not provide a link wholly undermined the accuser’s (and Mike Nifong’s) claims.

Professor Hattery, it seems, has quite an unusual linkage policy.

Hattery’s second observation about the lacrosse case asked readers to “recall that in the case of the Duke lacrosse team one of the fathers indicated that he didn’t see what the issue was, he and his Wall Street colleagues routinely unwind together at the end of the day at strip clubs.” Once again, the suddenly link-shy Hattery failed to provide any link to these alleged remarks; her readers, evidently, were just supposed to “recall” an alleged interview from more than six years ago.

The fathers of two of the falsely accused players (Seligmann and Finnerty) have over the course of their careers worked on Wall Street; neither of them ever “indicated” anything like the Hattery paraphrase. I e-mailed Hattery to ask her for a link to her item about “one of the fathers,” and also to ask why her post hadn’t provided a link to the AG’s report that used contemporaneous cell-phone photos to exonerate, rather than inculpate, the lacrosse players.

Professor Hattery did not reply.

[Update: After the appearance of the post, Professor Hattery graciously, if somewhat confusingly, replied. She did not indicate why her post left people to "wonder" about what might have been contained in social media evidence that was, in fact, released to the media (and released very early in the case). She added that she was concerned not with the legalities of the cases that she examined, but instead "focusing on the cultural [question] that contributes to behavior that is less than ethical." Not to recapitulate the above, but the title of her post--"rape" and not "alleged rape"--passed a legal judgment, and it's hard to see the connection between four cases in which (at minimum) sexual contact occurred and a fifth case in which no sexual contact of any kind occurred.

Hattery also cited this Washington Post article as the only source for her inflammatory claim that "one of the fathers indicated that he didn't see what the issue was, he and his Wall Street colleagues routinely unwind together at the end of the day at strip clubs."

Her blog post interpreted the article as saying two things: (1) one of the fathers quoted in the article worked on Wall Street, where he and his "colleagues [would] routinely unwind together at the end of the day at strip clubs"; and (2) the father "didn't see what the issue was," as part of a "boys will be boys" defense of his son. "This," Hattery mockingly asked, "is supposed to make me feel better?"

Both of Hattery's interpretations of the Post article are wildly off-the-mark; the first is simply wrong. In the article (which interviewed several parents), a parent named John Walsh said about the hiring of strippers, "You see it in New York; it's the preferred type of entertainment for Wall Street." But Walsh is identified in the very same article that Hattery cited as her only source not as someone who works on Wall Street or even in the financial industry--but as a "health administrator who lives in Bethesda," Maryland.

Most disturbingly, the article contains no suggestion that Walsh ever has visited a strip club, much less that he joined his colleagues from Wall Street, Bethesda, or anyplace else in "routinely unwind[ing] together at the end of the day at strip clubs."

Regarding Hattery's claim that the article featured the parents falling back on a "boys will be boys" defense, Walsh told the Post that he was surprised how prevalent the hiring of strippers on college campuses was, and that he didn't "advocate" doing so. A second parent, Tracy Tkac, gave a comment that's about as far away from Hattery's "boys will be boys" defense as you could get: according to Tkac, "Hiring a stripper is just as inappropriate as being a stripper."

As part of a post concerned with exposing "less than ethical" behavior, then, Professor Hattery falsely stated that a lacrosse parent "routinely" visited strip clubs with his work colleagues (in a city where he didn't even work); and then used that false claim to draw a negative inference in how parents of unindicted players sought to defend their sons' reputations.]

Politics of Grievance at Duke [Updated: The Group, and Tim Tyson, Strike Back]

[Updated, Friday, 1.07pm: In the race-to-the-bottom among critics of the paper, none other than Tim Tyson--yes, that Tim Tyson--has weighed in on the matter. In virtually any other environment, Tyson would have no credibility to comment on public matters. This was, after all, a figure who so badly misjudged the lacrosse case that he participated, as a "teacher," in a candlelight vigil on behalf of false accuser Crystal Mangum (who he described as somebody's "sweetheart") a couple of hours before Mangum took the stage, in a highly . . . limber . . . fashion, in a local strip club.

But in the race/class/gender-dominated academy, a race-baiter like Tyson speaks pearls of wisdom. And so in yesterday's Chronicle, Tyson goes after Peter Arcidiacono, fuming, "Who appointed [Arcidiacono] to weigh the merits of black folks being allowed into the room?" I was unaware that tenured faculty members like Arcidiacono had to be "appointed" before they could engage in scholarly inquiry.

As with virtually all of Arcidiacono's critics, Tyson does not challenge the data that the paper of Arcidiacono, et al., uncovered. Instead, he resorts to the race-baiting attack lines: after disingenuously suggesting that he's not challenging the academic freedom of people who don't share his world-view, he does just that: "Duke’s treasure, the late Dr. John Hope Franklin, whose legacy Arcidiacono treads upon, provided research for Thurgood Marshall in the Brown v. Board of Education case. But there is no constitutional right to R-E-S-P-E-C-T, as Aretha might put it. BSA members who question 'the research’s intent, methodology, analysis and conclusion, in addition to its validity,' display a generosity and deliberation far exceeding those of this study."

Once again: Tyson does not challenge in any way the data that Arcidiacono, et al., presented, that black students at Duke disproportionately migrate away from more difficult (science and engineering) to easier (liberal arts) majors.

[Updated, Wed., 8.14pm: In what could be deemed the least surprising development of this entire affair, prominent members of the Group of 88 have sharpened their race-baiting credentials to attack the paper.

Karla Holloway, notorious for her decision to pass along fifth-hand, slanderous gossip against Duke students, at least when doing so furthered her on-campus agenda, tweeted that "Duke authors' unpublished study of race + Affirmative Action lacks academic rigor." Nowhere in her twitter feed has Holloway provided any specific criticism of the study's data; indeed, in another tweet, she even elected to use scare quotes when describing the paper as a study.

The existence of the paper, the Group of 88'er wildly implied, indicated that "Duke still struggles w/issues of diversity," as she appeared to demand that Duke administrators publicly speak out about a research study from Duke professors. (This position was particularly rich coming from Holloway, who during the lacrosse case had issued the bizarre demand that Duke administrators had to publicly support her, as a Duke professor, from criticism.) In what could qualify as a textbook case of the politics of grievance in action, Holloway leveled the inflammatory allegation that the paper--a paper, again, whose data she does not appear to have publicly challenged--"re-opens old racial wounds."

The message here was clear: professors willing to provide data--even if that data is accurate--that challenges Holloway's worldview will face ill-concealed accusations of racism.

Holloway also tweeted a link to the blog run by Mark Anthony ("Thugniggaintellectual") Neal, who ran a post by David Leonard criticizing the paper. Imitating Holloway's race-baiting tactics, Leonard asserted that the paper (whose data he, too, did not challenge) "has dangerous implications."

Meanwhile the Black Student Association has upped its pressure, delivering what the Chronicle terms a "list of demands" to the administration. The list includes--of course--hiring more black professors. The almost laughable inference here is that Duke's arts and sciences faculty--a faculty where many departments are dominated by Group of 88 members, and others have strong Group influence--somehow are insufficiently attentive to hiring African-American faculty. Anyone who believes such a claim would have to reside in some sort of fantasy-land.]

Watching the returns from Saturday night’s South Carolina primary, I was struck by a focus group of Florida GOP voters, who had response dials as they listened to Newt Gingrich’s victory speech. Their dials skyrocketed into positive territory when Gingrich spoke of his willingness to stand up to ill-defined anti-Christian bigotry—this in a majority-Christian country where more than six in ten voters say they’d be less likely to support a presidential candidate who was an atheist.

But Gingrich did not need data or factual evidence to bolster his claims. Rather, as the (basically sympathetic) Sheldon Alberts correctly analyzed, the speech was part of a “broader ‘politics of grievance’ strategy that Gingrich is executing — at the moment — better than his rivals.”

As expert as Gingrich might be at practicing the politics of grievance—and he’s a master—the former Speaker can’t hold a candle to campus “diversity” advocates, who all but originated the tactic. An excellent example came last week at Duke.

The affair started with an unpublished paper penned by Peter Arcidiacono, Kenneth Spenner, and Esteban Aucejo. (Arcidiacono and Spenner are professors at Duke.) The paper used Duke’s own data to show that groups of students who receive preferential treatment in the admissions process (African-Americans and “legacy” admittees) disproportionately migrate from more difficult (science and engineering) to easier (liberal arts) majors.

The paper was cited in an amicus brief in the Fisher case. In briefs filed with the Supreme Court, a key, and persuasive, argument of opponents of on-campus preferences—including, as I wrote about at MTC, my UPI co-author Stuart Taylor—is that not only do these preferences violate the 14^th amendment’s promise of all people receiving equal treatment under the law regardless of their race, but preferences don’t even benefit the people (minorities, in this instance) they allegedly were designed to serve. In this instance, the paper’s authors concluded that “attempts to increase representation [of minorities] at elite universities through the use of affirmative action may come at a cost of perpetuating underrepresentation of blacks in the natural sciences and engineering.”

As far as I can tell, no one has presented evidence that challenges the accuracy of the data that the trio presented. To reiterate: as far as I can tell, no one has presented evidence that challenges the accuracy of the data that the trio presented.

The paper first generated outrage from Duke’s Black Student Alliance. The H-S revealed that the organization e-mailed the state NAACP to complain that “the implications and intentions of this research at the hands of our very own prestigious faculty, seemingly without a genuine concern for proactively furthering the well-being of the black community is hurtful and alienating.” Newt couldn’t have handled the faux grievance angle better!

The e-mail further noted that the BSA had demanded “a dialogue” with the paper’s authors “that addresses our concerns about research’s intent, methodology, analysis and conclusion, in addition to its validity.” Yet as far as I could tell, the BSA did not challenge the accuracy of the data that the paper presented. I e-mailed BSA president Nana Asante to ask her if, in fact, she had any complaints about the accuracy of the paper’s data. She did not reply.

Even more boldly, the BSA suggested that some type of “acknowledgement or intervention took place, in the best interests of black students” by the Duke administration. I also asked Asante what type of administration “intervention” she and her colleagues envisioned. She did not reply.

To reiterate: as far as I can tell, the BSA did not challenge the accuracy of the data that the paper presented.

According to the H-S, the grievance crusade then moved on from the BSA to a group of black Duke alums. Seventeen alums wrote to the H-S to say that “we are deeply troubled and offended by the recent study emanating from faculty members at our alma mater.” The letter accused Arcidiacono, Spenner, and Aucejo of “slander” and having produced “both flawed and incorrect” research.

Yet, at least according to what was revealed in the H-S article, the letter didn’t actually identify any specific areas in which the paper was “both flawed and incorrect,” much less slanderous. It’s not even clear to me who the paper could have slandered.

To reiterate: as far as I can tell, despite their overheated rhetoric, the alums did not challenge the accuracy of the data that the paper presented.

The grievance demands triggered a joint letter from Duke provost Peter Lange and other Duke administrators (including Group of 88’er Lee Baker, now a Duke dean). The letter gave a generic defense of academic freedom. But it also included this extraordinary sentence: “We understand how the conclusions of the research paper can be interpreted in ways that reinforce negative stereotypes.”

The administrators did not identify which “negative stereotypes” they had detected, nor did they explain how “the conclusions of the research paper” could be “interpreted in ways that reinforce” these unidentified “negative stereotypes.” The administrators’ letter did not challenge, in any way, the accuracy of the data that the paper presented.

Apart from instances of academic fraud or outright racist/sexist/anti-semitic “research” claims by professors (the “work” of Northwestern’s Arthur Butz comes to mind), I can’t recall a single instance of a university’s administrators—much less a leading research university’s administrators—accusing professors at their school of producing scholarship that could “be interpreted in ways that reinforce negative stereotypes."

This administrative outrage, of course, is highly selective. Imagine the following counter-example. A couple of Duke professors pen a research paper noting (correctly) that opposition to marriage equality skews toward under-educated segments of the population. Duke’s Christian student organization, whose members oppose marriage equality but who see an association with poorly educated people as personally offensive to their religious beliefs, pen a letter wailing that “the implications and intentions of this research at the hands of our very own prestigious faculty, seemingly without a genuine concern for proactively furthering the well-being of the Christian community is hurtful and alienating.” The Christian students demand “a dialogue” with the paper’s authors “that addresses our concerns about research’s intent, methodology, analysis and conclusion, in addition to its validity.”

Does anyone believe that Duke administrators would respond to the Christian students with an open letter seeming to validate their complaints about the (accurate) scholarship, or that “we understand how the conclusions of the research paper can be interpreted in ways that reinforce negative stereotypes”? And if such a public letter were penned, does anyone believe that Duke administrators would not be facing a revolt from the Group of 88 and their allies?

To reiterate: as far as I can tell, no no one has presented evidence that challenges the accuracy of the data that Aucejo, Arcidiacono, and Spenner presented. But in the contemporary academy, which worships before the altar of “diversity,” accurate scholarship can be insufficient—and can even, as in this case, generate an implicit rebuke from a university leadership.

Hat tip--O.S.

Academic Free Speech

An excellent essay by Peter Berkowitz on the topic. Here's his perceptive summary of the Duke case:

In 2006, even as the police had barely begun their investigation, Duke University President Richard Brodhead lent the prestige of his office to faculty members' prosecution and conviction in the court of public opinion of three members of the Duke lacrosse team falsely accused of gang raping an African-American exotic dancer. It turned out they were being pursued by a rogue prosecutor. To be sure, it was only a vocal minority at Duke who led the public rush to judgment. But the vast majority of the faculty stood idly by, never rising to defend the presumption of innocence and the requirements of fair process. Perhaps Duke faculty members did not realize or perhaps they did not care that these formal and fundamental protections against the abuse of power belong among the conditions essential to the lively exchange of ideas at the heart of liberal education.

A Treat for Duke Students

At most large universities, the position of undergraduate deputy serves as the department's ambassador to the undergraduate student population. He or she is the professor to whom students will come with questions about the department's courses, or rules and regulations, or faculty members.

An ability to deal with all students, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, or belief systems, would seem to be a minimum requirement for the position. For instance, a professor who believed that “many blacks . . . might not ever be persuaded by appeals to reason, to what we ‘know’ and agree to be ‘truth’—that all men/women were created equal, for example,” would be a problematic choice for deputy.

The current director of undergraduate studies of the Duke African-American Studies Department is none other than . . . Wahneema Lubiano, she of the opinion that “many whites . . . might not ever be persuaded by appeals to reason, to what we ‘know’ and agree to be ‘truth’—that all men/women were created equal, for example.”

Well, of course, students treated unfairly could always appeal to the department's fair-minded chair--J. Lorand Matory, the sponsor of the anti-Summers resolution at Harvard.

The Next Generation

This blog has often noted how—in the race/class/gender groupthink atmosphere that dominates many humanities and some social sciences departments—it is likely that the academy will become more extreme in the foreseeable future. Since department members control new hires, those likely to challenge the status quo can be screened out at the stage of the job description or, if the candidate somehow makes it past the screening committee, at the campus interview.

Citing the research of Cass Sunstein, Mark Bauerlein has termed this phenomenon the law of group polarization, which predicts "that when like-minded people deliberate as an organized group, the general opinion shifts toward extreme versions of their common beliefs. In a product-liability trial, for example, if nine jurors believe the manufacturer is somewhat guilty and three believe it is entirely guilty, the latter will draw the former toward a larger award than the nine would allow on their own. If people who object in varying degrees to the war in Iraq convene to debate methods of protest, all will emerge from the discussion more resolved against the war. Group Polarization happens so smoothly on campuses that those involved lose all sense of the range of legitimate opinion."

I’ve written elsewhere about how these patterns have affected my own field, history. Subfields perceived as dominated by “dead white males”—military history, diplomatic history, political history, and constitutional history—have largely been eliminated or “revisioned” beyond recognition, to become aligned with the preferred race/class/gender approach.

Such redefinition has occurred in one direction only. Scholars in social history, or ethnic studies, or African-American history, or gender history—who dominate most history departments in the United States—have shown little interest in “revisioning” their fields to include more attention to relevant military, diplomatic, political, or constitutional topics. It would be all but inconceivable for a department’s sole specialist in, say, U.S. women’s history to specialize in a topic like the regulatory theories of female members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Such a research area would occupy the fringe of a field that —as my former colleague, the gender historian B.S. Anderson, once candidly explained—considers historians who explore the activities of “figures in power” to be “old-fashioned.”

The net result of these personnel patterns is to produce departments filled with historians of race, class, and/or gender—or historians who are described as focusing on fields such as military, diplomatic, political, or constitutional history but whose research specialties nonetheless revolve around elements in the race/class/gender trinity. And, of course, at large research universities, these scholars train the next generation of professors.

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Duke’s History Department is marinated in the Group of 88’s race/class/gender-based philosophy. Ten of its members signed the Group’s statement, and an eleventh—Reeve Huston—attacked Duke students in his class in ways that clearly violated the provisions of the Faculty Handbook. So, perhaps, it should come as little surprise to see what passes for scholarly discourse among some of the graduate students that the Duke department trains.

One of those students, Sean Parrish, recently offered a glimpse into how he viewed the state of the field. The occasion was a posting by Douglas Campbell, who teaches at Cal. St.-Chico, on the blog of the National Association of Scholars. Among other items, Campbell discussed a class in which he spoke about military culture.

The Campbell post prompted a rambling response from Parrish, who identified himself as “an actual graduate student, studying at a university other Americans have actually heard of,” and addressed Chapman as “Mr. Doug Army Guy.”

Parrish begins by providing an unusual conception of the “point of academia”:

As I see it, the point of academia is to take note of the simplified caricatures society produces - whether by the media, a variety of counter-cultural knownothings, or crusty intellectual posers like yourself - and try to complicate them by pealing [sic] away their layers of obfuscation.

Those who thought that “the point of academia” was to pursue the truth and to expand knowledge apparently need to think again. Quite beyond the absurdity of allowing others—”the media, a variety of counter-cultural knownothings, or crusty intellectual posers”—to define the questions that dominate “the point of academia,” does anyone really believe that the contemporary academy has much interest in peeling (or “pealing,” in Parrish’s preferred lingo) away the “obfuscation” posed by counter-culture types? Or, for that matter, the “obfuscation” posed by politically correct broadcasts on NPR or PBS?

Parrish’s conception of the academy, in short, essentially seems designed to give license to professors to spend their time “complicating” what they perceive as “right-wing” ideas in American society.

Parrish further asserts that at Duke,

many[?!] of the grad students here are former military officers. One of our incoming students next year is an Air Force officer himself. There are many specialists here who study military history and military culture. Their aim is to understand the military as a sophisticated social institution, like the university, that presents problems continuous with themes social scientists have long considered important, such as the rise of the modern state, demography, economic trends, the history of the family, and wider social hierarchies. Their interests are not in advertising the military as an isolated bastion of unique values and heroic ideals mere “civilians” could never appreciate, nor are they concerned with waiving peace signs.

This is a wordy articulation of the “revisioning” thesis—military history as “the history of the family” and “demography.” These might be appropriate questions for a military historian to explore—but they also fall at the field’s margins, as opposed to more mainstream military history topics (the history of battles and tactics; strategic theories and the bureaucratic and intellectual struggles that help produce them; technological change and its effect on warfare; the relationship between war and diplomacy) that, unsurprisingly, seem to hold little, if any, position in Parrish's “revisioning” of military history.

This, again, would be a little like celebrating the fact that the department’s gender historians were looking at such themes as women in elective office, female judges, and Madeline Albright’s tenure as secretary of state—topics that might fit within the definition of women’s history, but that most would consider on the margins of the field. Somehow, if Duke’s women’s history graduate students were focused exclusively on women in politics and women in diplomacy, I doubt we would see Sean Parrish celebrating the situation as an illustration of the department's strength.

Parrish then loses control of his emotions, and describes the critique of the universities in the following way:

Let’s quit the bullshit and get at the real concerns motivating rightwing insecurities about the state of universities. It is not difficult to see this as just an updated version of an ancient fear among daddy-worshipping morons concerning the presence of effeminate ‘faggots’, ‘commies’, and women in positions of higher learning, and oh God forbid, positions of actual influence upon our youth! This has nothing to do with “rational debate”, it is merely an expression of paternalistic insecurities that always come to the surface and assume new forms as the traditional coordinates of public authority in society are renegotiated and debated . . . Perhaps the real concern underlying conservative diatribes such as yours is that many universities may be working too well in demanding students to ask questions, reflect upon their unexamined assumptions, and consider the troubling possibility that experience and understanding are not always one and the same thing.

Most defenders of the academic status quo would try to avoid the arrogance and condescension reflected in Parrish’s screed—at least in comments that they thought might be read outside of the academic cocoon. But there’s little doubt that the mindset reflected in these comments—and the fury at outside criticism of the academy that informs it—represents the majority viewpoint in most humanities and some social sciences departments nationwide.

Parrish then decides to argue against straw men.

“Brainwashing” [students], therefore, requires a level of effort and planning that few if any scholars would ever be willing to put into their work. The benefits are just not that interesting for personalities attracted to lonely recesses, personal independence, and the creative challenge of producing new knowledge even if it will only be appreciated by a small number of readers . . . Moreover, and this perhaps irritates me the most, is your incredibly arrogant disregard for the capacity of students to weigh the value of their instructor’s opinions against their own, and to maintain a healthy dose of critical distance in the classroom. There is much that goes on in the minds of students that you are not aware of, and it is your hubris that encourages you to believe that any student who expresses values different from your own must be a victim of some other pedagogical sorcery, rather than a critical and judicious thinker in his/her own right.

A handful of far-right figures—David Horowitz, Bill O’Reilly—have made the “brainwashing” allegation, a line of criticism that strikes me as absurd (one reason I have opposed, publicly and repeatedly, legislative enactments of Horowitz’s Academic Bill of Rights).

But Parrish’s description of how students approach their educational experience is nothing more than a convenient rationalization for those committed to safeguarding the status quo on today's campuses. The main problem in contemporary higher education is not academic groupthink “brainwashing” students. The problem is how the effects of groupthink lead to enormous areas of inquiry simply vanishing from the curriculum.

There is no reason to believe that the average student (who, after all, makes no claim to pedagogical expertise) has any idea what he or she has lost. Indeed, in the last 10-15 years, we have seen a conscious attempt to restrict the range of questions asked, issues explored, and knowledge derived— an unprecedented development in the history of the American academy.

Parrish concludes with a touch of class:

My point, Mr. Doug Army Guy, is that there are other more meaningful targets to attack if you insist upon exposing society’s many ills. You might want to consider, however, that the most logical reason for the proliferation of liberal attitudes on university campuses lies in the fact that books of a higher quality than those you cited are hardly in short supply there. I think we found your real culprit General Doug, get the bonfires blazing if you really want to do something about it. I look forward to hearing the responses of your pissant cronies as they derail my lack of professional decorum, obvious indoctrination, or failure “to understand your thesis”. Your supposed thesis was not all that interesting, the passions that motivated it and what it aims to conceal, however, are quite interesting indeed.

This paragraph speaks for itself.

NAS president Peter Wood (no relationship to the infamous Duke professor of the same name) noted that Parrish’s screed teaches us at least four things “about the graduate student mind liberated from ‘paternalistic’ reason”:

(1) Snobbery. Mr. Parrish gets started with the modest declaration that, “As an actual graduate student, studying at a university other Americans have actually heard of…” Mr. Parrish is at Duke; Professor Campbell teaches at California State University at Chico. Once we dismiss reason, snobbery is as good an argument as anything else. ‘I attend a better known institution, therefore heed me.’

(2) Ad Hominem invective. This starts with Parrish’s salutation, “Dear Mr. Doug Army Guy,” and gets progressively worse throughout the letter. Who does Mr. Parrish think he is? He thinks he is someone entitled to treat with contempt people he disagrees with.

(3) Uncivil language and abusive assertions. One of the rules of reasoned discussion is that we avoid gratuitous characterizations. Mr. Parrish knows virtually nothing about Professor Campbell, but freed from the restrictions of reason, he invents his own elaborate psycho-sexual fantasy and projects it on to Professor Campbell as “an ancient fear among daddy-worshipping morons concerning the presence of effeminate ‘faggots’, ‘commies’, and women in positions of higher learning.” If we ask, ”How does Mr. Parrish come by this privileged knowledge?” we can find the answer in his first paragraph. These are, he tells us, “insights.”

(4) Just plain nastiness. Reason demands that we try to persuade people. Absent reason, the passions take over, and in this case, irritability seems to be in charge.

It’s worth noting, as regular DIW readers already know, that these four characteristics also have regularly appeared in the Group of 88’s response to their critics.

I twice e-mailed Parrish to ask if he stood behind his comments. He did not reply.