Friday, May 09, 2008
[Jaw drops to floor]
This is amazing:
According to the Lubiano Trio, “the most extreme marginalization was reserved for the faculty whose professional expertise made them most competent to engage the discourses on race and gender unleashed by the inaugurating incident — scholars of African American and women’s studies. Instead, administrators, like the bloggers themselves, operated under the assumption that everyone was an expert on matters of race and gender, while actually existing academic expertise was recast as either bias or a commitment to preconceived notions about the legal case. Some faculty thus found themselves in the unenviable position of being the targets of public discourse (and disparaged for their expertise on race and gender) without being legitimate participants in it.”
What's the point of attempting satire when reality is so rich? They might as well have taken out an ad saying "Don't question your superiors!"
CWCID Volokh, Just One Minute
5 Comments:
By 
randian, at
Fri May 09, 01:30:00 PM:
I've always been amazed at the arrogance of humanities faculty.
By 
, at
Fri May 09, 03:22:00 PM:
Volokh notes that the illustrious Duke faculty members published their version of the lacrosse players’ incident in the illustrious journal Social Text . Given the reputation that Social Text has earned, it is fitting they would choose to publish in it. Earlier this week, with regard to the Dartmouth English instructor, another poster and I made reference to the hoax that a physics professor had submitted to Social Text, and which Social Text had published.
By , at
Fri May 09, 08:01:00 PM:
If they'd stuck to engaging the discourses on race and gender it would have been OK; sensible people could have ignored them as usual. But no, they had to engage discourses on guilt and innocence, where they showed themselves to have no competence whatever. The nascent discipline of Forensic Mau-mauing is not off to a promising start.
By Assistant Village Idiot, at
Fri May 09, 11:34:00 PM:
PZ - yes, it would be an irritating but defensible argument - if they had acted in a manner worthy of their claimed expertise. As their actual statements at the time fall below the standard of any average Joe who's trying to figure out what is going on, you have to wonder who they are talking about.
Perhaps overlooked is that they consider "discourse on race and gender" to be the most pertinent areas of expertise. I would have thought law and journalistic ethics might rank higher.
By , at
Sat May 10, 07:20:00 AM:
The narrative should be 'how we demonized some 'rich white people' to fit our stereotype and prejudices about black/white relations' and almost got away with it.
