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(Tenured Radical)

Friday, March 19, 2004

LET'S REVIEW, SHALL WE?

Another week, another heaping helping of hoaxes - and I'm only talking about the academic ones.

Other cultures, to be sure, have their Ern Malleys and Ossians, but there's something special about the United States when it comes to self-aggrandizing chicanery. In the general population there's an exquisite calibration between credulity (hoaxees) on one side and narcissism (hoaxers) on the other; but in the university population in particular there's a double dose of narcissism and credulity, so we get (to list only the most notorious over the last few years)

*** The Sokal hoax, in which a clever physicist got an unclever critical theory journal to publish reams of manifest bullshit;

*** The Yasusada hoax, in which a clever assistant professor of English in the American midwest somewhere got an unclever poetry journal to publish poetry he claimed was written by a Japanese survivor of the Hiroshima bomb;

*** The Wilkomirski hoax, in which a rich goyish Swiss guy got historians to believe he was a Polish Jew who survived the holocaust through a series of experiences that would have made Jerzy Kosinski (another hoaxer) blush;

*** The Rigoberto Menchu hoax, in which a book written by a sophisticated French ideologue was successfully marketed to American academics as having been written by an oppressed peasant.


Again, these are just hoaxes for and about academics; I won't bother reminding you of the Jayson Blairs and Stephen Glasses. I'm interested only (this here weblog being after all University Diaries) in the President Judds who palm off as their own work the work of others.

And who are rewarded for it. Having disgraced his institution, Judd recently received an overwhelming vote of confidence from the faculty. (He's in the hospital at the moment, by the way, resting comfortably after having collapsed. I fear, however, he may have plagiarized someone else's collapse.)

Poor Kerri Dunn, on the other hand, the latest in a long line of hate crime hoaxers, is far from being a university president. A mere visiting professor, she will be easily disgorged from the Claremont colleges into the hands of federal authorities irritated with her for lying to them. After dropping the claim that she didn't do it (under pressure from physical evidence and eyewitnesses), Dunn's lawyer will say she's effing out of her mind and that she trashed her car in the same belle hysterie into which Winona Ryder falls whenever she steals tens of thousands of dollars worth of clothes.

[Update, three hours later:

Sheesh! It's hard to keep up. The Ryder comparison was more apt than I knew. From today's Los Angeles Times (latimes.com):

Dunn, who received her Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Nebraska, had a few brushes with the law while in Lincoln, court records show. She was arrested Sept. 29, 2000, on a shoplifting charge of which she was convicted and fined $200, records show.

Other charges of possession of stolen property, refusing to comply with police, and failure to appear in court were dismissed.

She was arrested on New Year's Eve in 1999 in Lincoln on similar charges of concealing merchandise, but that case was later dismissed, records show. She was also found guilty of driving on a suspended license in 1999 and was fined $50, records show.
]

But Dunn is much more dangerous than a petty thief - she is an ideologue. She is like the lecturer in English at the University of North Carolina who sent an email to her class condemning one its students as a violent hateful person because he said in a discussion that he had trouble with homosexuality; like the Berkeley instructor whose course description growled that conservatives better stay out of his classroom; and like the Columbia instructor who wished out loud for "a million Mogadishus." As with zealots everywhere and at all times, these characters are capable of all sorts of nastiness, including, in the case of Dunn, profoundly destructive crimes. Anything for the cause.

University professors and administrators have a special responsibility to overcome their all-American credulity and become more skeptical. Why special? Because the people we are supposed to be educating are young. Young people can be expected to act as the intelligent, sensitive Claremont students acted when they thought Professor Dunn was something other than a liar - with excitement and outrage and passion on behalf of all sorts of good things like tolerance and kindness. We are supposed to help our students cultivate not the angry cynicism that the Claremont students feel today, but mature circumspection. By over-reacting and posturing, the Claremont administration played to its students' emotions and gave a conwoman a podium. They have done great damage to a great university.