Duke’s Privileged Puffed Up Professors

Update (12/12): KC Johnson answers this question: “Through what kind of process do professors like [Wahneema] Lubiano get hired?”
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Here’s some common sense advice for everyone: Never puff up your academic and professional credentials. All it takes is one smart and motivated person to do a little digging and expose you to ridicule.

KC Johnson, premiere Duke case blogger, has been blogging his butt off. Not only has he been burning up bandwidth reporting on procedural errors in the case, but he’s taken Duke faculty to task, particularly members of the “Group of 88,” professors who signed off on a letter/advertisement rushing to judgment against the lacrosse players. By signing and publishing that letter, the professors became fair game.

Johnson’s coverage of the Duke case and subsequent criticism of Duke’s faculty are two reasons why blogging is so important. Anybody with a computer, Internet connection, and a little time on their hands can churn out post after post of the kind of reporting mainstream media should be doing.

As a professor, Johnson probably was naturally interested to know what credentials these professors hold. According to the Duke Chronicle, Johnson said that some of them had “meager credentials” and one had a pattern of “adopting ideologically extreme positions that fail to stand the test of time.” He added: “Since March 14, nearly 100 of Duke’s arts and sciences faculty engaged in rush-to-judgement denunciations of the lacrosse players.”

I haven’t read the letter/ad, but I can guess what’s in it. I’ve had the misfortune of knowing the type of privileged, ungrateful professors who inexplicably paint themselves as “victims” of “white male privilege.” They sounded stupid to me even when I was younger and liberal. I’d agree with what William Anderson, an assistant professor of economics at Frostburg State University, said about the Group of 88: “These young men represented everything these faculty members despised, and they were not going to permit something as bourgeois as truth stand in the way of their attempt to remake Duke University in their own image.”

Johnson has blogged about various members of the group, including Karla Holloway, a typical liberal “feminist” professor, and most recently, Wahneema Lubiano, a professor light on scholarly credentials.

Johnson is brutally thorough as he dissects Lubiano’s work and public statements. For example, the tenure professor’s published track record is thin, to say the least. She lists Like Being Mugged by a Metaphor: “Deep Cover” and Other “Black” Fictions as forthcoming in 1997, then lists the same book as forthcoming in 2003. A book titled Messing with the Machine: Politics, Form, and African-American Fiction also was listed as forthcoming in 1997 and 2003. Johnson notes that the same “books” were listed as forthcoming in 1999.

The two books (manuscripts, actually) obviously were never published, but Lubiano includes them on her curriculum vitae. What’s the big deal, you ask? Johnson writes, “In the most charitable interpretation possible, Lubiano has offered misleading claims, which exaggerated the extent of her publishing record…Some might consider it hypocritical for a professor with such a record to lecture anyone, much less her own institution’s students, about the canons of ethical personal behavior.”

Johnson examines Lubiano’s essays and teaching, highlighting such inane rhetoric as “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.” The irony is lost on a tenured professor with a cushy job supplied by a capitalist system she accuses of being racist.

Johnson’s not through with Lubiano. Today he’ll answer this question: “Through what kind of process do professors like Lubiano get hired?”

Can anybody say “affirmative action?”