Duke lacrosse: KC Johnson “moves” to Durham-in-Wonderland

Historian, professor and blogger Robert KC Johnson has moved to Durham-in-Wonderland where he’ll continue the outstanding Duke lacrosse blogging he began at Cliopatria.

Here’s part of KC’s first Duke lacrosse post, Duke News (April 16):

In the latest in what has seemed a poorly managed investigation, the Durham police gained entry, without warrants and apparently without the assistance of the Duke police, to Duke dorms and attempted to interrogate several lacrosse players, who all sides knew had lawyers.

When asked about the matter Friday, Brodhead said he didn't know enough about the issue to comment, and hasn't said anything since.

With his concerns about “a poorly managed investigation” and President Brodhead’s silence, KC was ahead of most people.

Back on April 16 hardly anyone on the Duke faculty was expressing any concern about what Nifong and the police were doing. And few have publicly expressed any concern since, although many now want me to know when we talk face-to-face that they had “grave concerns very early.”

Back on April 16 the editorial writers at the Raleigh News & Observer and the Durham Herald Sun had no problems with the investigation. In fact, they still don’t.

Both papers continue to support Nifong in his determination to prosecute three Duke students whose indictments were the results of investigative travesties that included a photo ID procedure in which the accuser was told she would be looking only at pictures of students who had been at the party.

Duke Law Professor James E. Coleman, Jr understood the purpose of that travesty: “Any three students would do; there could be no wrong choice.”

President Brodhead has found nothing critical to say about Nifong. Brodhead hasn’t questioned any of the investigative travestes that included a photo ID that most people would see as a frameup. Throw the indictments out? Brodhead’s told the Friends of Duke University that he’s looking forward to the students having a chance to prove their innocence at trial. (Yes, it is supposed to work the other way.)

Brodhead may be silent but KC has continued to speak out on many aspects of the Duke lacrosse hoax. His posts are carefully researched, organized, and literate.

There’s something I especially like about KC’s posts: He can skewer hypocrites, especially ones from the academy. Look how KC responded to Duke’s Professor Karla Holloway when she recently indulged in some PC preening in a letter to the Herald Sun :

Holloway, who is currently chair of the Race Subcommittee of President William Brodhead’s Campus Cultures Initiative, complained about “the athletic spaces of Duke where it has become painfully clear that for some, the rules of the game are different.”

Duke, she proclaimed, is a campus beset by the “problematic issues of race, respect, and equity” (it’s worth remembering, as I’ve noted before, that Group of 88 members are talking about a campus where a department chair could jokingly explain away the faculty’s overwhelming ideological imbalance by noting, “If, as John Stuart Mill said, stupid people are generally conservative, then there are lots of conservatives we will never hire.”)

It might be that the Duke Chronicle was wrong when it chastised the Group of 88 for "listening" to a handful of students while ignoring the "several thousand others of us” undergrads who disagreed that “Duke breeds cultures of hate, racism, sexism and other forms of backward thinking.” But at this stage, the campus newspaper has more credibility on this issue than someone who signed the Group of 88's statement.

Holloway continued on how difficult this entire process has been for her. “Of course you want a chance to make your campus better,” she recently told the Herald-Sun, "but at what cost? When you are serviced to fix the problem and you are also the victim, it’s a double duty.”

Holloway holds an endowed chair in English. Moreover, I’m a bit dubious about how anyone who joined what David Brooks has termed Durham’s “witch hunt” by signing the Group of 88’s statement defines “victim.”

Holloway also informed Herald-Sun readers that “her committee has been working hard all summer, fully informed by many documents, including those from the President's Council on Black Affairs, the Duke University Black Alumni, as well as students, administrators and faculty members.”

Yet today, when people e-mailed Holloway to ask about her letter, they received the following reply:

Thank you for your message. However, I will be away from the office and will not be reading email regularly until August. Until that time, the most reliable way to reach me is to post your correspondence . . . If your message is urgent or time sensitive, please contact the English Department Office.

Perhaps Holloway’s subcommittee isn’t working all that hard on campus this summer. (But then again, it doesn’t need to do so, since its conclusions appear to have been laid down by the Group of 88's statement.)

Or perhaps Holloway is simultaneously toiling away on campus this summer while she’s out of her office and not answering her email until August—just as one of Nifong’s targets, Reade Seligmann, was simultaneously committing a crime while he was videotaped at an ATM machine a mile away. The last three months have shown that the law operates differently in Durham; perhaps physics does as well.

Keep it up, KC. You do great work.

And welcome to Durham in Wonderland. Our town needs more folks like you.