At least Farred is consistent.

Consistency is easier to maintain when you pay no fealty to reality.

The following train of… (well, it’s not logic, and it’s certainly not thought) diarrhea-like stream of consciousness perhaps exemplifies the best of the postmodern influence on racial studies:

• Abbreviation of lacrosse = lax
• Suggestive of the latitude, lack of discipline for Duke lacrosse
• Associates the introduction of “x” with signifier, importance to black power movement, the American unknown (?)
“The unknowable necessitates the production of thought”
• Native American inventors of lacrosse
• Malcolm X
“In the name of the ‘X’, there is always a secret history of violence.”

It’s self-parody! Note that Farred ACTUALLY made this abortion of an attempt at argument during the bout of postmodern diarrhea that he called a lecture. The above is, word for word, direct from the notes, and sadly in tune with the rest of Farred’s meaningless verbiage (see KC Johnson’s blog for Farred’s ridiculously hilarious take on Yao Ming).

David — it’s Crystal MaNGum, not Crystal Magnum.

Clicking on the link provides the following at the top of the wikipedia page.

“Crystal Gail Mangum
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from Crystal Magnum)”. Like I said in the deleted comment, her mustache is not nearly as impressive as Tom Selleck’s.

Yes, you too can provide trenchant insights like the brilliant and learned “scholar” Grant Farred.

Here’s mine:

• An abbreviation of “Facsimile Machine” is fax.
• Suggestive of the Euro-centric, heteronormative fixation on “Facts” as opposed to narratives or authentic cultural experiences.
• Associates the introduction of “x” with signifier, importance to black power movement, the American unknown.
“The unknowable necessitates the production of thought”
• You never know what’s going to be on an incoming fax, and what color is fax toner? It’s not White!
• The first fax machine was sold by Giovanni Caselli, an Italian, back at a time (1861) when Italians were not considered “White”
• Malcolm X
“In the name of the ‘X’, there is always a secret history of violence.”
• Fax machines have been replaced by email and .pdf because people can’t handle the secret violence of the “black” toner covering the “white” paper.

Anybody want to do: M/max, Sox (Boston was the last team in MLB to have a Black player; but curiously, the first hockey team thanks to the Boston-friendly name of “Willie O’Ree”; Chicago’s White “Sox”), Hans Blix, the gustatory delight that is lox, fox, box, Tex(as), Mex(ico), ATX motherboards, or the xylophone? Tax(es) might be a bit too easy, given the poll tax.

Thanks for taking the notes, very interesting. If one dollar of my Williams donations go towards supporting this idiot’s presence on campus for even one day, it is one dollar too many. Pretty much everything he says is complete nonsense, in particular, his central theme: that somehow, by proclaiming these players innocent, the attorney general was making some broader commentary about their moral culpability for anything else they may have ever done in their life. Ummm, no. They were charged, falsely charged, as rapists. It is hard to imagine a more evil act, beyond rape itself, perpetrated by the false accuser and her many, many enablers, including Mr. Farrad. They were not charged as racists, or guys who liked to drink, or for being upper class whites, or for anything else. What they were declared innocent of was, quite simply, the false charges against them: nothing more, nothing less. I am very, very discouraged by the lack of tough questions posed to this fraud. For those at Williams who have any doubts about just how egregious and wrongheaded Mr. Farrad’s nonsensical ramblings are, I encourage you to read KC Johnson’s blog, which details in methodical fashion the TRUTH behind what happened, and continues to happen, at Durham.

I just don’t get what’s going on at Williams this Spring, between the Hitler controvery and now this. Where is the silent majority?

the silent majority is drinking beer and playing wiffleball outside, like any sensible college kids on such a spectacularly beautiful day.

Loweeel: so funny.

Maybe the Record interviewer can ask him his take on campus posters.

Why does this gobbledegook remind me of one of the editorials in the Record yesterday (fast forward twenty years …)?

More on Farrad at Williams:

http://www.thetranscript.com/sports/ci_5792424

Good find, Zeeman.

It is a shame that college admissions doesn’t have micro-targeting. If I were the Duke admissions committee, I would send the following quote to every admittee who is also considering liberal arts colleges:

“Duke is a great school, and everybody holds it up for emulation all the time. It gets some richly-deserved accolades.”
– Morton Schapiro, President of Williams College

That would probably convince a handful of students a year. Though, matriculation is probably influenced most by the success of its basketball team.

Transcript article (hat tip Jeff) by Adam Bloch ‘06 is excellent and consistent with our notes. But how many people were there? What was the breakdown in terms of students versus faculty versus residents? How supportive was the audience and how could Adam tell? More details please.

The Record should have covered this talk.

It’s a long way from Williamstown to Durham, N.C. — a 678-mile drive, according to Google Maps. Such distance makes the campuses of Williams College and Duke University seem entirely remote from each other.

But the Duke lacrosse rape case, which has drawn a firestorm of national attention and debate over the past 14 months, has shown a tendency for involving even those far from North Carolina. What began in March 2006 as an ordinary rape investigation quickly ignited an increasingly public and widespread discourse on racism, sexism and college athletics.

The reverberations has been felt even in faraway Williamstown as three current and former Williams professors have played roles peripheral to the case, which came to a legal conclusion on April 11 when North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper cleared the three accused lacrosse players of all charges.

Few commentators on the alleged attack have drawn as much attention as Grant Farred, a former professor and junior varsity soccer coach at Williams in the late 1990s who has since moved on to Duke. Currently a visiting professor of Africana Studies at Williams this semester, Farred delivered a talk titled “Public Secrets, Public Scandals: the Event of Duke Lacrosse” at Griffin Hall on Monday.

Farred decried the finality of Cooper’s declaration of innocence and what he considered the all-encompassing immunity it offered the accused. Though he eventually admitted that the three players were not guilty of rape or kidnapping as initially charged, Farred felt that they (and the rest of the lacrosse team) have shown “a tendency toward misogyny and arrogant sexual prowess.”

The crux of his argument was that the Duke lacrosse team had a long history of unlawfulness — mostly citations for public drunkenness — and was guilty of using racist and sexist epithets. As such, he claimed, their publicly announced innocence provided an affirmation of Southern white privilege.

“The Duke lacrosse program is indicted here not for whatever happened on that night, but for its past — its blemished past,” Farred said. “The lacrosse team has a history of being inhospitable, of being bad neighbors to Durham … it is the history of racism in the South.”

Farred first achieved a measure of recognition as one of the 88 faculty signers (commonly known as the Group of 88) of an advertisement in The Chronicle, the student newspaper at Duke. The final statement in the full-page notice read, “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. To the students speaking individually and to the protesters making collective noise, thank you for not waiting.”

Farred created more controversy last October when he wrote an editorial in The Herald-Sun, the primary daily newspaper of Durham, that accused Duke students then participating in a voter registration campaign of “closing ranks against Durham” and “(displacing) the problem of racism from the lacrosse team and the university to Durham’s political system.”

On Monday, Farred reserved some of his harshest criticism for the North Carolina legal system: “The law is madness because it is megalomaniacal. The law is authoritative and tyrannical enough to close this event with a single word and a press conference.”

Asked how his experiences as a coach at Williams had influenced his thinking, Farred responded, “I don’t understand institutional loyalty. I don’t understand the uncritical relationship between sports and institutions.”

Farred, who courteously declined to answer questions from the Transcript afterwards, claimed that the lacrosse program at Duke operated from a privileged position that allowed athletes any misconduct as long as they performed well on the field.

The audience on Monday was mostly supportive in its questioning, but another former Williams professor has established himself as perhaps the foremost critic of Farred’s actions with regard to the Duke case.

K.C. Johnson, who taught history at Williams from 1995 to 1999 and is currently a professor at Brooklyn College, has become one of the most unlikely figures in the public debate over the Duke lacrosse case. Initially intrigued by an interest in what he termed “academic groupthink,” Johnson began posting messages on a historians’ Web log concerning the investigation. As his interest grew, he formed a blog of his own — the amusingly named “Durham-in-Wonderland” — and became a highly prominent critic of the prosecution of the case and professors such as Farred.

“Maybe I’m naive, but I’d like to think that the academy stands for due process,” he said in a phone interview recently. “The more involved I became in the case, the more upset I became. This was basically a case where everything was upside down. Nothing was happening as it should have.”

Johnson, who at this point posts several long blogs per day and has become incredibly well versed in the investigation’s minutiae, is also the co-author of an upcoming book about the case.

Of Farred, Johnson would only say, “He has unusual attitudes toward sports,” referring to his former colleague’s book “Phantom Calls: Race and the Globalization of the NBA.”

Johnson also said his experiences with Williams athletics were overwhelmingly positive.

“Athletically, Williams is kind of the Division 3 equivalent of Duke, where you have the combination of high-class academics with high-class athletics,” he said. “I had a decent number of athletes in my classes at Williams. Some were extremely smart and some weren’t, but all were very hard working in the classroom. This idea that athletes are somehow given special treatment at academically elite institutions just felt false to me. I didn’t have the sense that Williams had compromised its academic standards for athletics.”

Johnson’s comparison between the two colleges didn’t sit right with Williams President Morton O. Schapiro, who noted that Duke is a major research university with more than 12,000 students, while Williams is six times smaller.

“I wouldn’t overplay that,” he said of the similarities between his institution and Duke. “The world in Division 1 is so different than Division 3. I’m not saying we can’t learn something from Duke and Duke can’t learn something from us, but they’re in a completely different world down there. I know Division 1. It’s a different ball game.”

Schapiro also was tangentially involved in the lacrosse case as a member of the Presidential Council, one of the five committees that Duke President Richard H. Brodhead formed in the immediate aftermath of the accusations.

The council’s mission, according to Schapiro, was to “scrutinize Duke’s responses to the lacrosse team incident, advise the president on best practices in other university settings and consider ways Duke can promote its values.”

Schapiro, who thinks he was asked to join because of his past experience with athletics as a dean at the University of Southern California, traveled to Durham last November. His duties for a weekend consisted mainly of reviewing reports by the other four committees. He was unable to attend the council’s most recent meeting several months ago but provided a critique of a final overarching document published in February called “The Report of the Campus Culture Initiative Steering Committee.”

Schapiro said the primary lesson he drew from his experience was the importance of campus communication. Unlike Farred and Johnson, he had only praise for Duke’s administration.

“Duke is a great school, and everybody holds it up for emulation all the time,” he said. “It gets some richly-deserved accolades. I was very impressed with their honesty in that final report. They took a clear look at themselves. I admire them for being so forthcoming.”

Of course, (d)avid, the liberal arts competitors to Duke would have plenty of ammunition to counter. For example, they could cite the Duke professor who compared the Duke lacrosse team to whites who perpetrating lynching. His comment received, so far as I know, no rebuttal from the Duke administration. Or they could cite the Group of 88 member who decided to fail some lacrosse players in her class our of spite despite the fact they were solid B students. etc. etc. … I really hope Williams doesn’t have the sort of profs who would say or do these types of things. So far as I am aware, it doesn’t. It’s one thing, and perfectly fair, to be critical of athletic culture at a school (like the Nike camp comment), it’s another to compare athletes to racist murderers and to punish them in grading because of team affiliation.

I wonder what the good professor means by ‘legal reasons’?

Certain anti-athletics Duke professors in their classes have been unfairly punishing student-athletes for ages. The Duke administration needs to clean up the actions of both the faculty and also the athletic teams but most of all itself. A resignation of its President would be a good start, accompanied by replacement by a person who will stand strong against the internal, local community and alumni political winds. I would oppose any of my grandkids attending Duke in its present condition - as if I would have any control over or influence in the matter.