Quote:

 

http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2007/08/group-profile-william-chafe.

MONDAY, AUGUST 27, 2007
Group Profile: William Chafe

William Chafe is Alice Mary Baldwin Professor of History, where his scholarship, as his website states, “reflects his long-term interest in issue of race and gender equality.” He specializes in U.S. history after World War II, with a particular focus on African-Americans, women, or radical whites.

Unlike many in the Group of 88, Chafe has published widely. And unlike most Group members, several of Chafe’s books have received widespread attention and praise. His website states that his most important book “helped to re-orient scholarship on civil rights toward social history and community studies”—but, unlike so much of the rhetoric that’s come from the Group, the statement isn’t a boast. Civilities and Civil Rights, a study of the Greensboro sit-ins, has been widely used in college courses for the past quarter-century.

Chafe penned a second prize-winning book in his biography of Allard Lowenstein, Never Stop Running. The book is clearly a sympathetic portrayal of Lowenstein—the longtime liberal activist best-known for his role in jumpstarting the dump-Johnson movement of 1968—but is also exhaustively researched, and framed Lowenstein as part of broader political and intellectual developments of the 1960s and 1970s. David Oshinsky termed the book “both a superb biography of Lowenstein and a gripping history of liberal protest and reform in an increasingly conservative age.”

It’s hard to believe that someone who authored two such high-quality books could have taken such a closed-minded approach to events in Durham over the past 17 months.

----------

In a 2002 address, he explained his strategy to faculty personnel matters: “There has remained a tendency to think of Duke as a place of wealth, whiteness and privilege. We aim to change that.” The Chronicle added that “Chafe said faculty diversity is still lacking, and that the University must continue to seek new ways to attract women and minorities.”

It’s worth remembering that Chafe wasn’t exactly speaking of 1950s Ole Miss in these remarks. Events of the past 17 months provide scant evidence that the Duke faculty is filled with professors determined to do everything they can to prevent the employment of women or minorities at their institution.

Chafe’s policies drew strong praise from the expected quarters. His associate dean, future Group stalwart Karla Holloway, gushed later that Chafe “managed, urged and encouraged institutional change around the issues of diversity.” (The diversity of which Holloway spoke, of course, did not include intellectual or pedagogical diversity, in which neither she nor Chafe have shown any interest.) “He has understood—both politically and ethically—the complexity of this objective, and has worked consistently to make it a substantive fact of our lives at Duke, rather than simply an ‘issue.’” (This ethics-based endorsement came from a person who displayed her own ethics as she wrote about the lacrosse case “white innocence means black guilt,” or when she passed along, though a mass e-mail, fifth-hand scurrilous gossip about the lacrosse players.)

Elite schools normally have placed academic excellence, not “diversity,” as their primary goal in hiring, as Economics professor Roy Weintraub pointed out at the time. “Any college has a limited resource,” Weintraub explained, “of not only money but administrative energy. Duke’s Arts and Sciences has, with the president’s and Board of Trustees’ direction, chosen to spend its money and energy on increasing diversity. There is, of course, an alternative choice seen in the past to be appropriate for the unique institution that is a university and that is the development of an ever-more distinguished faculty . . . Duke makes choices at the margin in every resource allocation decision and every programmatic expenditure. Have we chosen to settle for using our resources to achieve a more diverse faculty instead of a more intellectually distinguished one? The record of the past decade seems to indicate that the answer is ‘yes.’”

Chafe dismissed the concern, glibly suggesting that “diversity enhances our quality rather than diminishes it.” But Chafe—like extreme “diversity” advocates more generally—eluded Weintraub’s point. John Staddon, James B. Duke Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences, observed at the time that the “argument against selecting for diversity is an example of a more general principle: Even if ability is equally distributed, if you limit your search you will often fail to hire the best person available.”

Critics from outside the academy often suggest that “diversity” leads to the hiring and retention of under-qualified minority candidates. There are, of course, a few examples of the pattern among the Group of 88—take, for instance, Wahneema Lubiano (Ph.D. 1987, no scholarly monographs published) or Thavolia Glymph (Ph.D. 1994, no scholarly monographs published). Duke also has a highly unusual policy requiring the provost, “in the event the AP&T Committee’s recommendation is negative . . . to determine whether all factors relating to the merit and value of the candidate, including ethnic, racial, and gender diversity, have been fully and adequately considered.”

That said, it’s illegal to openly restrict the applicant pool by advertising that no white males (or, in some cases, white females as well) need apply. And, in most cases, it’s also illegal to discriminate on the basis of gender and (usually) race in the hiring process itself.

Yet, as Staddon noted, another path exists for diversity zealots to achieve their goal: “redefine excellence. Some might argue that an excellent physicist is not just someone good at physics but someone whose other attributes—region, gender, race—satisfy some non-physics criterion. ‘Excellence,’ in this new definition, represents a balance between these two sets of criteria.”

“Diversity” also can be achieved by reconfiguring the likely pool of applicants. For instance, a “diversity” dean committed to bringing aboard a gay Chicano male professor understands that he is more likely to do so by approving a new position in gay Chicano literature than one in biochemistry—because the applicant pool for the former field will likely contain a disproportionate share of gay Chicano males, while the applicant pool for the latter field is likely to contain about the same percentage of gay Chicano males as exist in the population as a whole.

And if a “diversity” dean wants more African-American female professors, he more likely can achieve his goal through green-lighting new positions in African-American cultural studies than by granting the Economics Department a new line to hire a specialist in high finance—again because the applicant pool for the former slot will likely contain a disproportionate share of African-American females, while the applicant pool for the latter field is likely to contain about the same percentage of African-American females as exist in the population as a whole.

But, of course, Duke (like all universities) has limited resources. For every new position created to advance a “diversity” agenda—almost always a race/class/gender-oriented professorship in humanities or a few social sciences departments—another faculty position will not be funded, even those justified by the more traditional rationale of hiring for curricular need or to replace distinguished professors who have left or retired. The (perhaps unintended) result? Over time, faculty culture dramatically changes, and the University comes to house a disproportionate number of professors whose fields reflect a belief that the United States, and Western society as a whole, is deeply oppressive on grounds of race, class, and gender.

Or, in other words, just the kind of faculty members willing to set aside the academy’s traditional fidelity to due process (to say nothing of professors’ usual caring for the well-being of their own students) and see in the wild allegations of Crystal Mangum and Mike Nifong—claims that white, male, elite athletes had sexually and verbally victimized a poor, black, female mother—a validation of the beliefs upon which their intellectual careers had been built.

---------

This certainly is how Chafe initially viewed the lacrosse case. But his subsequent behavior “evolved” in such a way that he has never questioned his initial extreme remarks. His path:

1.) March 31, 2006: By this point, the only information known was presented by Mike Nifong and the Nifong-led DPD investigation. But despite the academy’s traditional fidelity to dispassionate evaluation of evidence, the former dean published an inflammatory op-ed in the Chronicle suggesting that the whites who kidnapped, beat, and murdered Emmett Till provided the appropriate historical context for interpreting the lacrosse players’ behavior. In an unintended commentary on the lax intellectual basis of his article, this historian of the civil rights movement misindentified the year of Till’s murder, one of the highest-profile events of the 1950s civil rights struggle. Chafe’s misuse of history in the op-ed certainly raises some questions about whether he has been so cavalier with sources in his scholarly work. While I’ve assigned both Civilities and Never Stop Running in past courses, I could never do so again seeing how Chafe evaluated evidence in the lacrosse case.

2.) May 3, 2006: By this point, the media had reported on both Reade Seligmann’s alibi (including the video of him somewhere else at the time of the “crime”) and Mike Nifong’s ordering the police to violate their own procedures to produce a players-only lineup. Chafe took to the pages of the Chronicle of Higher Education not to apologize for his initial rush to judgment but to condemn those who elected to “hem and haw over the details of what did or did not happen.” Instead, he reasoned, people needed to focus on the party, whose effects he compared to Hurricane Katrina(!) and which proved that Duke needed a policy that “any student group, on or off the campus, that promotes or engages in racial stereotyping is subject to disciplinary action.” Ironically, his own essay violated his proposed policy: he asserted, without qualification, that “a student group at Duke—the lacrosse team . . . hurled racial epithets at black people.” In fact, one player, not the 47 members of “the lacrosse team,” hurled one epithet, in response to a racial taunt from Kim Roberts. Chafe was thus suggesting that Brad Ross (who wasn’t even in Durham the night of the party and about whose character no one, to my knowledge, has ever said anything publicly critical) should have been disciplined solely on the basis of personal behavior by another member of a 47-person student organization to which Ross belonged.

3.) January 17, 2007: Chafe joined 88 colleagues in signing the “clarifying” letter. The document stated, “There have been public calls to the authors to retract the ad or apologize for it . . . We reject all of these.” It also affirmed, “We appreciate the efforts of those who used the attention the incident generated to raise issues of discrimination and violence”—the precise stated aims of the protests organized by the potbangers who carried the “castrate” banner on March 26, 2006; and the “activists” who blanketed the campus with “wanted” posters on March 29, 2006.

4.) February 23, 2007: By this point, Nifong had dropped the rape charge and recused himself from the case after the Bar filed ethics charges. It was clear both that Mangum’s and Nifong’s stories were total fabrications. Chafe’s response, in an op-ed co-signed by five others? It was time to “move forward,” stop talking about the lacrosse case’s lessons, and enact the CCI’s Group of 88 Enrollment Initiative. Michael Gustafson delivered a devastating critique: “I have no choice but to believe that moving forward, to these six faculty members, means take the story DA Nifong chose to tell and then fast-forward to now as if nothing else had happened. I have no choice but to believe that these faculty members, in seeing that the reality of the situation in no way plays into the assumptions of white, male, athlete privilege that our (blessedly former) colleague Houston Baker championed want us to base our thoughts and actions on the narrative created in the first two weeks rather than the realities discovered over the past eleven months.”

5.) April 30, 2007: By this point, all charges had been dismissed and AG Cooper had proclaimed the players innocent victims of a rogue prosecutor. Chafe’s response? To lash out at critics of the Group. “Bloggers who have targeted the ‘Group of 88’,” he informed the Chronicle, were guilty of “sending us e-mails and making phone calls wishing our deaths and calling us ‘Jew b-’ and ‘n-b-’.” When I subsequently asked him to produce evidence that any of the dozen or so “bloggers who have targeted the ‘Group of 88’” had done any such thing, he admitted that he couldn’t substantiate his accusation (which was, it’s worth reiterating, an allegation that an identifiable group of people—“bloggers who have targeted the ‘Group of 88’”—had engaged in criminal activity.) His new rationalization? “There were repeated phone calls and e-mail messages. I never claimed they were from you, but they were concerted.” Alas, his insinuation that the Chronicle misquoted him came up short—since the Chronicle article quoted a Chafe e-mail.

---------

“Sex and Race.” It was the title of Chafe’s March 31, 2006 lacrosse-players-as-lynchers op-ed. It also could describe the intellectual approaches of the overwhelming majority of Group of 88 members, whose scholarship Dean Chafe so zealously championed.

To return to Chafe’s 2002 address, and his assertion, “There has remained a tendency to think of Duke as a place of wealth, whiteness and privilege. We aim to change that.”

Chafe and his colleagues in the Group of 88 certainly managed to fulfill that goal. Duke is now thought of an institution where dozens of “diversity”-obsessed professors rushed to judgment to advance their personal, pedagogical, and ideological agendas, at the expense of their own students’ well-being, and subsequently refused to apologize for—or even acknowledge—their dubious conduct.

Quote:

 

http://chapelboro.com/news/state-government/the-anatomy-of-the-moral-monday-movement/

The Anatomy Of The Moral Monday Movement
By Rachel Nash

Posted June 30, 2013 at 2:48 pm

--------

April 29: Week One

- 17 arrested

This was the first NAACP protest; Barber called it a non-violent “pray-in.”
Bishop Larry Reid, pastor at the Cathedral of Hope Church in Carrboro; Dr. Timothy Tyson, a professor at Duke University; Vice President of the NC NAACP Reverend Curtis Gatewood; and Barber himself were among those first arrested.
They were arrested on misdemeanor charges of second-degree trespassing, failure to disperse on command and violating building rules.


May 6: Week Two

- 30 arrested

- Running Total: 47

Tye and Wanda Hunter of the United Church of Chapel Hill were arrested during this rally. Barber’s 20-year-old son, William Joseph Barber III; former Duke University Dean of Arts and Sciences, William Chafe; Duke Professor of Public Policy and History, Robert Korstad; and UNC historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, were also arrested.


May 13: Week Three

- 49 arrested

- Running Total: 96

Chapel Hillians of faith from the Community Church of Chapel Hill Unitarian Universalist, Binkley Baptist Church, and the United Church of Chapel Hill made the trek to Raleigh. This was when the name “Moral Monday” was introduced.

(snip)


June 12: First Witness Wednesday

Eight people were arrested inside the state building, including Durham City Council member Steve Schewel.
[publisher of the Indy--which endorsed Nifong, and then Cline, for DA...]

This event, organized by the NAACP, commemorated the 50th anniversary of the assassination of civil rights activist Medgar Evers, while also continuing their fight against the Republican-led state government.

(snip)


June 24: Arrestees from first Moral Monday on April 29 appear in court

NAACP legal advisor Irving Joyner said charges should be dismissed, arguing that the Constitution gives protesters the right to peacefully assemble on public property and address their legislators. District Court Judge Dan Nagle said his court handles only pleas or the assignment of attorneys, not hearings with witnesses. He subsequently assigned them September court dates, when the issue of dismissal will be heard.


June 24: Week Eight

- 120 Arrested

- Running Total: 592

This “Mass” Moral Monday saw the largest attendance of all the NAACP’s rallies. General Assembly Police estimated more than 1,500 protesters. The rally focused on labor, women and economic justice issues.
Those arrested include Chapel Hillian Fredy Perlman, Marybeth Powell of Carrboro, and state AFL-CIO President James Andrews. US Congressman David Price attended

[who was too busy to get involved with the lacrosse case and the attempted railroading of three innocent Duke students]

along with State Senator Ellie Kinnaird and Verla Insko. MSNBC and Fox News sent camera crews to cover the event.

Quote:

 

http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2007/03/chafe-way.html

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 14, 2007
The Chafe Way

In an AP interview published yesterday, History professor and Group of 88 member William Chafe complained, “There has been little willingness to presume good faith on the part of anyone, or to admit that there could be some justice on all sides of the issue.”

I can only presume that Chafe was, unintentionally, engaging in self-criticism, since evidence of his choosing to “presume good faith” on the part of some of his institution’s students has appeared nowhere in the record since March 31.

That morning, Chafe published an op-ed in the Chronicle asserting that the whites who lynched Emmett Till provided the appropriate historical context through which to interpret the behavior of the lacrosse players. Chafe has subsequently contended that his making the comparison did not suggest the he presumed the players’ guilt—an assertion that is all but impossible to take seriously.

Beyond the Till comparison, Chafe, as Duke graduate student Richard Bertrand Spencer perceptively observed, seemed “unable to view the lacrosse team’s hiring of a black stripper outside the ‘context’ of his gothic portrayal of miscegenation.”

“Sex and race,” Chafe declared on March 31, “have been intertwined since the beginning of American history. They remain so today, throughout America and here at Duke. The events that occurred on Buchanan Boulevard two weeks ago are part of a deep and troubling history” in which “sex was an instrument by which racial power was manifested and perpetuated.” At the time, of course, Chafe was operating only on the information that had been released to the public by Mike Nifong and the Durham Police Department.

(snip)

How did Chafe respond to these revelations? By chastising those who elected to “hem and haw over the details of what did or did not happen.” And by approvingly quoting an (anonymous) alleged student: “You know, we are all responsible for this, because we have not held accountable those who have committed sexual assaults on our campus.” It’s rather hard to miss the presumption of guilt in that statement.

In his May essay, Chafe compared the “Duke lacrosse fiasco” to Hurricane Katrina(!), since, “In one horrific evening early this spring at Duke University, the tensions of race, sexuality, town-gown conflict, and class inequity came together in an explosion that laid bare the fault lines that threaten our capacity to act as a human community.” The time had come, he declared, to “make it ‘uncool’ to be known as the living unit that is famous for the quality of the alcohol that will get women drunk so they will be more vulnerable to sexual advances.” In recent weeks, Chafe has claimed to be genuinely puzzled that anyone could have interpreted these statements as presuming guilt.

A few weeks ago, Chafe and five colleagues penned a column demanding that the campus “move forward,” lest people attempt to examine the arts and sciences faculty’s springtime rush to judgment. The anonymous, alleged student from Chafe’s May article made her reappearance, though by February, her quote had slightly changed: she now maintained that “we are all guilty because we have never called to account those people who have engaged in date rape or sexual assault.” Another anonymous, alleged student from the May article also resurfaced, again with a slightly different quote.

Though the names of five other professors were attached to the February 2007 column, its themes and structure were identical to Chafe’s May 2006 Chronicle article. It is remarkable that after everything to have emerged since May 3, 2006, Chafe’s perspective on the lacrosse case appears frozen in time.

In discussing those with whom he disagrees, meanwhile, Chafe’s words have demonstrated no “willingness to presume good faith on the part of anyone, or to admit that there could be some justice on all sides of the issue.”

In October, when asked by New York Sun reporter Eliana Johnson about blog criticism of the Group of 88, Chafe refused comment, announcing, “I don’t want to dignify that baloney.”

In a recent interview with Diverse, he characterized the Group’s critics in the following way: “There’s a whole industry out there seizing on the opportunity to pillory a group of faculty members as leftist, racist, elitist, avant-garde Marxist people. They are creating a wonderful straw person to attack.”

So where, exactly, in Chafe’s comments or analysis about the case is a “willingness to presume good faith on the part of anyone, or to admit that there could be some justice on all sides of the issue”? It appears as if Chafe is unwilling to hold himself to the same standards that he demands of others.

Quasimodo

Aug 12 2013, 09:13 AM

So if a Duke student (and moreover, a white, wealthy, out-of-state, athlete) was charged with raping a poor
working woman of color,

what might be the expected response of Chafe

Lubiano

Holloway

Tyson

Barber

Gatewood

Schewel

Joyner

and Neal?


If we were surprised, perhaps we shouldn't have been...?