Dartblog

K.C. Johnson, the brilliant history professor whose blog helped vindicate the Duke lacrosse players and shed light on D.A. Nifong’s misdeeds, now turns to the Duke Arts and Sciences faculty, elements of which egged for conviction from the very start—if not in the courtroom then in the public square. If you’ll recall, a “Group of 88” professors issued the most poorly written legal brief you’ve ever seen at the beginning on this debacle. It was an exhortion to condemn the students even before their case reached trial.

Now, as Johnson notes, they (and they are now 87 in number) are speaking again, insisting that said advertisement was never meant to comment on the rape case itself, but was rather “a call to action on important, longstanding issues on and around our campus, an attempt to channel the attention generated by the incident to addressing these.” But of course their advertisement wasn’t anything so abstract.

The advertisement ended by trumpeting the professors’ displeasure with the presumption of innocence. To wit: “The students know that the disaster didn’t begin on March 13th and won’t end with what the police say or the court decides,” they wrote. “We’re turning up the volume in a moment when some of the most vulnerable among us are being asked to quiet down while we wait.”

True to their word, those professors didn’t wait to hear what the police said. They turned up the volume, raged, raged, and in the end the facts drowned their polemic.

It is easy to recognize just what this new mea culpa is: It is the faculty’s teary regret that its passions, its opinions, its cant, and the very essence of its hypersocialized curricula got out into the open, falling prey to a judgmental public. “We want the absence of terror. But we don’t really know what that means,” said the ad. The public said: “That doesn’t make any sense.”

Duke must defend against “drunken white male privilege loosed among us,” a professor wrote. “That’s the silliest thing we’ve ever heard,” the public replied.

“This is a social disaster,” the Group of 88 wrote in bold type. “What in Sam Hill does that even mean?” the public was heard to say.

America and the professoriate just don’t speak the same language. I think the new communique from the Group of 87 is meant to blur that fact.