Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Duke faculty hoax-believers are rewriting their history

In March 2006 it wasn't hard to realize what the then anonymous accuser was saying happened at the Duke lacrosse party was a lie.

In the first place, how could three large male athletes and an exotic dancer all squeeze into a small bathroom in a very modest house whose former owner said he didn't see how more than two people could fit in it and have room left to brush their teeth?

And even if all four did get into the bathroom, how could the three men strangle, beat, rape, and sodomize the woman while she battled them for 30 minutes, at the end of which time all four walked out of the bathroom without any of them having a slight sprain, a simple fracture or a small cut that required even one stitch?

Who would believe such a story?

Certainly not people with enough sense to find their front doors in the morning and their way home at night.

But alas for its reputation, many members of Duke's Faculty of Arts & Sciences were ardent and outspoken hoax-believers.

And some were involved in despicable actions that included attending a rally where CASTRATE and GIVE THEM EQUAL MEASURE banners waved and physical threats were shouted, after which 88 Duke faculty members took an ad in The Chronicle to, among other things, thank those at the rally and those who'd distributed the Vigilante posters "for not waiting."

But times change.

The NC attorney general declared the players innocent.

Duke's trustees are paying out millions to fend off lawsuits resulting from its shameful "throw the lacrosse team under the bus" strategy.

And some faculty hoax-believers are now busy rewriting the history of what they did.

It's all very Orwellian. They present their fictions as facts. And as you'd guess if you know the Duke faculty hoax-believers, the sorrow they feel is for themselves, whom they view as the real victims of the frame-up attempt they helped launch and sustain for almost a year.

Today at Durham-in-Wonderland, KC Johnson, who contributed so much to the exoneration of the Duke students falsely indicted by a now disbarred DA, tells us:

Wahneema Lubiano, whose last scholarly publication was entitled “Interview with Wahneema Lubiano,” recently took a break from her two “forthcoming” manuscripts, Like Being Mugged by a Metaphor and Messing with the Machine. Both of these manuscripts, it’s worth remembering, have now been “forthcoming”—a designation that normally means completed and under contract—for eleven years. (My goodness, KC, they'll be teenagers before you know it and old enough to go to dances on their own. -- JinC)

Lubiano joined fellow Group member Michael Hardt and “clarifying” professor Robyn Weigman to co-author a scholarly article (published in a Duke University Press journal called Social Text) designed to . . . defend the Group of 88. This piece joined Charlie Piot’s effort as at least the second “scholarly” Group apologia—providing an unintentional commentary on what passes for scholarship among the Group of 88.

Lubiano, Weigman, and Hardt had little difficulty in identifying the true victims of 2006-2007 events in Durham—themselves, and their fellow members of the Group of 88.

The victimizers? Not Mike Nifong, or Sgt. Gottlieb, or Duke administrators who failed to enforce the Faculty Handbook. Not the Duke professors who rushed to judgment or abused their classroom authority. No, the victimizers, according to the Lubiano Trio, were “the blogs.” ...
Ah, yes, "the blogs."

Didn't Mike Nifong also blame "the blogs" for his troubles?

And Duke's President Richard Brodhead has also complained about "the blogs."

Will someone please lend me a pencil? I think I can connect the dots.

I'll post again tomorrow about the latest attempt by certain Duke faculty to rewrite their history.

Be sure to read KC's post here.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's not really the blogs that cause them trouble. It's the truth that the blogs expose and document for all time that causes them justifiable concern.

Thank you, JiC, for your continued contribution to their despair.

It may not be the justice we seek but it is something. Actually, quite a big something.

Anonymous said...

John, I think they prefer to stick to their own version of the reality. It suits them better.

Anonymous said...

This provides some idea of the quality of Social Text.

"The Sokal affair (also Sokal's hoax) was a hoax by physicist Alan Sokal perpetrated on the editorial staff and readership of the postmodern cultural studies journal Social Text (published by Duke University). In 1996, Sokal, a professor of physics at New York University, submitted a paper of nonsense camouflaged in jargon for publication in Social Text, as an experiment to see if a journal in that field would, in Sokal's words: "publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions."[1]

The paper, titled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity"[2], was published in the Spring/Summer 1996 "Science Wars" issue of Social Text, which at that time had no peer review process, and so did not submit it for outside review. On the day of its publication, Sokal announced in another publication, Lingua Franca, that the article was a hoax, calling his paper "a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense", which was "structured around the silliest quotations I could find about mathematics and physics" made by postmodernist academics."

Anonymous said...

Why would anyone pay such large amounts of money to send a student to Duke, where:
• Brodhead is president.
• Durham police are allowed to unfairly target Duke students.
• Durham (the city) is crime-ridden and dangerous.
• Durham police and a dishonest and corrupt prosecutor framed innocent lacrosse players.
• Many university professors are of questionable quality.

Anonymous said...

John -

As I mentioned on KC's site last night, I finally figured out from what KC reproduced, why Duke University Press is taking so long to publish Wahneema Lubiano's "scholarship." They have to get rid of all the mistakes. (Tongue in cheek.)

Jack in Silver Spring