Elsewhere (22)

Heather Mac Donald spots some familiar sleight-of-hand in the New York Times: 

Any given violent crime is 13 times more likely to be committed by a black than by a white perpetrator - a fact that would have been useful to include in the Times’s lead, which stated that “Blacks and Latinos were nine times as likely as whites to be stopped.” These crime data are not some artefact that the police devise out of their skewed racial mindset. They are what the victims of those crimes - the vast majority of whom are minority themselves - report to the police.

KC Johnson notes the rewards of academic extremism and dogmatic impropriety...

In any other profession, behaviour as outrageous as that exhibited in the lacrosse case by the faculty in Duke’s humanities and (some) social sciences departments would have prompted at the least intensive soul-searching and (in the corporate world, at least), dismissal.

And then rumbles yet another doctrinaire professor:

Doubtless Prof. Kimmel did not write an essay for a high-profile publication intentionally littered with factually inaccurate or wildly misleading statements... Indeed, I have little doubt that Prof. Kimmel actually believed that what he wrote was true. In the groupthink atmosphere that dominates so many humanities and social science departments, “facts” that conform to the prevailing narrative... get “remembered” in ideologically convenient ways, to such an extent that a prominent professor could pen an article for one of the highest-trafficked news sites on the internet and not even bother to check his assertions.

And the good people at FIRE show how freedom of speech can be turned on its head. In academia, of course.  

Comments

[Rafi]

"Wahneema Lubiano... informed correspondents that she spent the spring 2009 semester in Prague. It's not clear what Lubiano did in the Czech Republic, but scholarship doesn't appear to have been her focus---having been granted tenure by Duke without a scholarly monograph, Lubiano has spent the last 13 years claiming to possess two "forthcoming" manuscripts."

Sounds like the bigotry of low expectations.

[David]

Rafi,

“Sounds like the bigotry of low expectations.”

Lubiano’s academic “career” and ability to mouth bollocks with impunity does suggest that her employment isn’t entirely based on intellectual rigour or an acquaintance with facts. Perhaps she’s employed because her “scholarly” publications include a three-page interview with herself. Or maybe it’s because she describes herself as a “post-structuralist teacher-critic leftist” and insists there can be no distinction between her role in the classroom and her bizarre, somewhat paranoid, political “activism.”

Lubiano claims that “knowledge factories” and “engines of dominance” [i.e. universities] should be “sabotaged” – by people with views like her own. Her courses in “critical studies” and “race and gender” are construed in such a way that students can be told, at length, that “once white working class people learn that corporate capitalism is using racism to manipulate them, they will want to join with racially oppressed people against capitalism.” (This is what’s costing unlucky parents $40,000 a year.)

During the infamous Duke lacrosse saga, Lubiano promised to continue her prejudicial ravings “regardless of the truth” established in court. A promise that may tell us something about her more general approach to education. Lubiano also says – but never proves - things like this: “Western rationality’s hegemony marginalizes other ways of knowing about the world.” Which suggests the West is somehow devoid of literature, art, music, film, etc, when it is in fact the foremost producer and consumer of such things.

http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2006/12/wahneemas-world.html
http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2009/03/from-burch-to-lubiano-via-bohemia.html

[AC1]

Talking of Producers of Art and also seen elsewhere...

http://thompsonfamily.typepad.com/thompson_familylife/

A relative perhaps?

[Ted S., Catskills, NY]

No, David, you phallocentric white patriarchic hegemon; you don't get it.

It's not that the hegemonic West is devoid of literature, art, music and film; it's that these are marginalizing things like Balinese puppet theatre, Tuvan throat singing, and Venezuelan soap operas which are obviously superior ways of knowing about the world.

(How on earth can people keep this s*** up?)

[Jonathan]

“Western rationality’s hegemony marginalizes other ways of knowing about the world.”
Presumably they would be irrational ways of knowing about the world? I really wish I could spend all day talking cobblers and get paid $100,000 to do it. Though some might say I already talk cobblers;).