KC Johnson has a long post taking apart a recent scholarly article on the Duke Rape Hoax by three faculty members — Wahneema Lubiano, Michael Hardt, and Robyn Weigman -- the first two of whom were involved in stirring up hatred against the Lacrosse players.
Apparently, some of the Social Text article is unintentionally funny:
Lubiano, Weigman, and Hardt had little difficulty in identifying the true victims of 2006-2007 events in Durham—themselves, and their fellow members of the Group of 88.
The victimizers? Not Mike Nifong, or Sgt. Gottlieb, or Duke administrators who failed to enforce the Faculty Handbook. Not the Duke professors who rushed to judgment or abused their classroom authority. No, the victimizers, according to the Lubiano Trio, were “the blogs.”
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.”
If the Group’s expertise made its members “most competent to engage the discourses on race and gender unleashed by the inaugurating incident,” there was nothing, to my knowledge, to prevent them from doing so. Instead, of course, Group members by and large pursued an opposite approach. They rushed to judgment in issuing their statement when most people presumed the lacrosse players guilty—and then, when the case started to collapse, they either refused to explain their earlier position or offered almost comical rationalizations for their spring 2006 statements and actions.
The Lubiano Trio’s new narrative requires some . . . creative . . . re-interpretations of the past. To take some examples:
The Group of 88’s Ad
Here’s how the Lubiano Trio’s article described the Group of 88’s ad: It “sought to grapple with issues of campus life and the cultures of privilege sustained by elite institutions such as Duke University.”
Yet here’s how Lubiano herself described the ad in early April 2006, when she invited people to sign: “African & African-American Studies is placing an ad in The Chronicle about the lacrosse team incident [emphasis added] . . . We will not be listing the names on the ad itself (only the supporting departments and program units).”
The Lubiano Trio’s article makes no mention of this inviting e-mail, nor the ad’s unequivocal assertion that something “happened” to Crystal Mangum, nor the ad’s thanking—“for not waiting and for making yourselves heard”—the protesters who had presumed guilt, nor the ad’s claim that five departments officially endorsed its contents even though none of the departments actually voted on the matter. It remains unclear how any of the above items relate to “issues of campus life and the cultures of privilege sustained by elite institutions such as Duke University.”
The Blogs
Intoned the Lubiano Trio, “The latter framing [focusing on the accuracy of the allegations] was embodied most prominently by Friends of Duke University, an organization formed to raise money for the defendants.”
What are they talking about? FODU, a grassroots organization of Duke alumni and supporters, was created in summer 2006 not to raise money for the defendants but to urge the Duke administration to publicly demand that Durham authorities accord to Duke students the same due process rights granted to all other Durham residents.
The Lubiano Trio appears to have confused FODU (which wasn’t a fundraising organization) with the Association for Truth and Fairness, the organization that did raise money to help defray the defendants’ legal bills.
The only problem: the ATF wasn’t a blog—which makes its existence irrelevant to the Lubiano Trio’s commentary on the blogosphere.
The Media’s Role
The Lubiano Trio informed their readers that “the television newsweekly 60 Minutes aired five segments on the topic, and stories appeared in the New Yorker, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, and Sports Illustrated, on the editorial pages of every major newspaper in the country, and on local and national evening newscasts.”
Actually, 60 Minutes ran three, not five, segments on the topic. And the New York Times, which most people (especially, I suspect, members of the Group of 88) would consider a “major newspaper in the country,” did not publish an editorial on the case.
The Defense Attorneys and the Group of 88
After scouring the defense attorneys’ change-of-venue motion, the Lubiano Trio concluded, “Since its publication, the ad has figured prominently in both campus and media debate and was cited as evidence in a defense motion for change of venue, on the assertion that the accused players could not receive a fair trial in a town in which prominent community members, including faculty, had failed publicly to defend their innocence.”
In fact, the December 2006 defense motion contained no such assertion. (The Lubiano Trio’s article contains a footnote citing the defense motion, but the authors, perhaps unsurprisingly, elected not to specify a page number in which this assertion allegedly was made.) To my knowledge, no defense lawyer, at any stage of the case, stated that “prominent community members, including faculty, had failed publicly to defend [the players’] innocence.” Defense attorneys spoke about the presumption of innocence—a far different thing than an outright declaration of innocence. And many critics of the Group of 88, including me, spoke of the need for academics, of all groups in American society, to speak up for due process—which is also a far different thing than an outright declaration of innocence.
That the Lubiano Trio equated calls for professors to defend due process and the presumption of innocence with demands that academics actually affirm the players’ innocence gives a sense of how skewed were Group members’ conception of the justice system. . . .
Blog Criticism of the Group
Blogs, according to the Lubiano Trio, used “powerful tactics of harassment” against members of the Group. “Typically we [Group members] should . . . work as maids for the players’ families [or] return to the slave quarters.” Group members “have also been found guilty of numerous crimes, including treason, sedition, and tax evasion(!).”
Although the Lubiano Trio’s article does contain footnotes, the Group members elected to supply not even one citation for any of these outlandish claims. It doesn’t take a Ph.D. to figure out why.
What does the inclusion of these unsourced ramblings say about the editorial policies of the Duke University Press journal Social Text?
Here is what the scholars wrote in Social Text regarding the Group of 88:
[They] would become the objects not simply of hostility, on campus and off, but also of enormous faux-juridical speculation that sets forth the “legal” case against them and establishes the terms of the judgment they “owe” to make amends. (Typically we should resign, work as maids for the players’ families, return to the slave quarters, apologize, or simply hide in shame. At the very least, as Joseph W. Bellacosa has argued in a Newsday opinion piece, “Duke Faculty Should Be Shunned by Students.”). . . . In the language of the blogs, we were not just communists but traitors, and the fields of study we occupied were not areas of scholarly inquiry but pathological hothouses in the service of anti-American sentiment and reverse racism.
Here is the confusingly written footnote supporting the last quoted sentence:
A number of blogs have focused on discrediting the scholarly projects of specific members of the so-called 88 as a means of casting suspicion on their possible standing in the Communist Party and their complicity with terrorism and anti-Israeli sentiment. They have also been found guilty of numerous crimes, including treason, sedition, and tax evasion.
First, I strongly doubt that suggestions that the offending professors should "work as maids" or "return to the slave quarters" were "Typically" offered by their critics. Indeed, in a very quick Google search, I couldn't find any instances of these two suggestions. Such disgusting insults must have been relatively rarely made by their editorial and blogger critics, if made by them at all.
Second, the way that the footnote's comment about being a communist is presented makes it appear that such a claim is unwarranted. But according to a mainstream news magazine review of Johnson's book, Michael Hardt is a "self-described 'joyful communist.'" Is Hardt now implying that he was misquoted, or is he objecting to people describing him in the same terms that he describes himself? Certainly, there is nothing sleazy about calling a self-described communist a communist, just as it would be fair to call a self-described fascist a fascist.
Third, as KC Johnson notes, it was bad form for the professors not to have supported their claims about the blogs with actual citations to the offending posts. Assuming that the professors are not engaged in their own little hoax, I wonder whether their complaints about blogs aren't mostly about commenters to the blogs, rather than the posts of actual bloggers. Given the three professors' documented sloppiness with the truth and their unusual claims in their new article, the editors of Social Text should have required citations before allowing them to make such questionable claims in a scholarly article. (Indeed, it's not too late for the editors to publish an errata online giving citations for each claim I quoted and indicating which of them were actually made by bloggers themselves.)
Last, why do these Duke professors bother to write about the Duke lacrosse hoax if they are not going to deal with their own actions honestly? If they can't simply face the truth, they should put down their shovels and stop digging.
Social Text?
This Social Text?
Sheesh, they sure picked the right place for THIS article...
* Still, these women [women he teaches in his class and claims were terrified by the lack of a strong response on Duke's part] will surely sleep better this evening than the black woman injured at 610 Buchanan Boulevard by the white lacrosse team's out-of-control violent partying will ever again rest in her life.
Or perhaps he and Duke thought he was on a scholarship but the donor's check bounced.
It seems that they commented, by erroneously attacking the accused. They were incredibly wrong. Why should they be given the presumption of competence? Why shouldn't they be marginalized when their track record shows an obvious disregard for the truth and legal process in favor of accusing people who did commit the crime of not fitting into their study groups by not being women or african-american. I'm all for academic freedom, but I already felt the Group of 88 deserved some censure, and this article shows they do not even realize they did anything wrong. I do not think people like this should be teaching. {Bias alert: I doubt the need for women's studies as well}
Didn't they do this recasting themselves? I took their public stand to be an expression of their views. Their views were obviously not based on facts but on accusations and lies. Isn't rushing to accusation with such little knowledge evidence of bias? Its at the very least poor science. If these teachers conduct their "research" in such a manner, I question the quality of anything they produce.
There are people who study race and gender in a scholarly way. They are in social science and biology departments.
Actions have consequences.
But that tends to be consistent with their academic study areas (laments of the perpetual victims of society) too.
Since academia needed a way to promote incompetent people who couldn't study a real subject.
That's not entirely true. Steven Baldwin, one of the two or three professors who spoke up for the players was viciously smeared as a racist by Robyn Weigman and forced to apologize and retract a letter he published in the Duke Chronicle.
Here's how Weigman responded to Baldwin's letter:
Kiddos who are graduating Duke with $60-80K in student loans as the cost of an "education" delivered by Yahoos such as these.
Crystal Gail Mangum graduated last week from North Carolina Central University. No sanctions were ever imposed on her by any legal authority or academic authority.
If the Duke lacrosse boys had made up a fake assault against a minority or group of minorities, we can rest assured that the Duke faculty would be sure that they were subject to discipline.
I thought being "tarred and feathered, ridden out of town on a rail" was what they did to you when they caught you cheating while gambling. What is its relationship to race?
As an historical aside, the most common use of Tar and Feathers seems to be taking place in Northern Ireland, the home of my ancestors.
I will let you decide on the context and scholarly content of the above open letter by the Professor of Woman's Studies and Literature from Duke University.
Actually, I disagree with KC Johnson on whether NCCU should have disciplined Mangum. Whether off-campus crimes should be the subject of campus discipline is a thorny issue. Generally -- though not in every case -- I think they shouldn't.
Fedka,
Thanks for the info on Wiegman.
So at least they understand that the rest of the world (1)calls BS on their claims for expertise and (2) knows what their agendas are. The university would be better off if it dissolved all of its ethnic and gender grievance programs.
For those who do not think this is a serious problem, think again. For Latinist, Kors cited several works by other academics which show how womens studies and African American Studies have advanced political tracts which do not conform to scholarly rigor as 'scholarship' for their programs. The same can be seen as well in American Indian studies - Ward Churchill is exhibit A. There are probably similar problems in any program based on identity politics. I think the best over-view ( in a publication by academics from a real, academic press, I might add) is: Gross, Paul R. and Norman Levitt. Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.
Ward Churchill's record has been carefully debunked by LeVelle and Brown, as well as the Rocky Mountain News. Garbage published by fringe publishers working out of garages for the most part. Allegedly first rate scholarly output from graduate faculty worthy of a PhD granting research university? Not at all, but it is what the historians who buy into this call 'usable history.' The same applies to much of what is published in any of the ethnic or gender identity studies. These are departments with a political mission, rather than seeking knowledge for its own sake.
As for the recent Social Text piece, well, Johnson demolishes any notion that it might qualify as scholarship in any self-respecting college or university. Unfortunately, it is not just Duke. Dude Cool is correct. His school would come down the same way, and I suspect most public colleges and universities would. The ones in my state seem to be pretty much in line with the underlying thought seen at Duke.
One last thought. How many more examples of this corruption do we need before academics realize that there is something seriously wrong in the ivory tower? Just another example of what's wrong. Thanks Dr. Lindgren, and Dr. Johnson. Academe is in desperate need of fumigation. Keep shining the sunlight in!
In academia, "sunlight" is NOT the "best disinfectant." It is constructed as an assault upon those who are brought into the light. And, if they belong to a "protected group" . . .
Well, given the insights in your above post, I don't think I need to tell YOU how my sentence ends.
Wow, that is an incredibly concise and accurate description of these types of contrived social fields. I wish I could have thought of it.
For people who aren't tenured Professors at Tier 1 Universities, I agree that actions have consequences. But, please remind me of what consequences members of the Gang or 88, or their howling crowds of supporters, have faced?
They were blogged about. The horror!
I would not say that the work maids, toilet cleaners (and garbage collectors) do is Less harmful to society, I would say it is Beneficial to society.
How anybody could construe that as racial lyching is beyond my comprehension.
Mine as well. I can even tell you who in my department would have been right out in front leading the charge for the students' blood.
I hope that at some point the academy will purge itself of this poison. Perhaps I'm unduly pessimistic, but I can't see it happening in my lifetime.
It took me a paragraph in to figure out that he was never going to talk about a new scholarship that was being offered.
For gosh sakes, Mr. L., put "scholarship" in quotations, anyway. This isn't scholarship in any sense of the word. Shyeesh.
Well, they did comment. People thought they were idiots, and concluded the departments they represneted were a waste of time and money.
I wonder if it was the first time some of them experienced being told they didn't make any sense and had nothing to say?
As they say on Fark, you win the internets with that statement. That's what the whole entire Social Text article boils down to - one very public snit about the fact that people outside the Ivory Tower judged these professors and found them to be biased and incorrect, if not downright incompetent and malevolent. These professors have suffered no other ill consequences from this entire affair - no censure, no arrest, no jail time, no crushing legal fees. Yet, because someone once made a snide comment about them on a blog, they are the "victims."
Pathetic, absolutely pathetic.
1) That expertise does NOT make me an expert on comtemporary international relations (though it also does not PRECLUDE this: Rather, I should have to DEMONSTRATE that expertise, as would anyone else).
2) If I were to be BLATANTLY WRONG in a published statement about, say, the 1890 failure of Germany to renew the Re-Insurance Treaty, this would be cause to call my "academic expertise" into question. NOT to call into question the people who pointed out the error.
3) Diplomatic historians are now an endangered species in universities, because "lines" are being used instead to hire people in these more tendy, more politicized fields.
4) "That's just the way of the world." (Flipper)
the false claim of rape is referred to as "the inaugurating incident"
"Actually, I disagree with KC Johnson on whether NCCU should have disciplined Mangum. Whether off-campus crimes should be the subject of campus discipline is a thorny issue. Generally -- though not in every case -- I think they shouldn't. "
i pretty much agree. especially in regards to a public university. the issue SHOULD be academics. otoh, why she wasn't PROSECUTED is a better question. sure, maybe there wasn't enough evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that she willingly fabricated the story.
the more likely scenario is that it's politically incorrect to prosecute a "single woman of color oppressed rape victim".
the fact that she ISN'T a rape victim is of course irrelevant. it's the "metanarrative" that matters. see: dan rather
Ah, the old appeal to authority; foundation of modern logic.
IIRC they decided she was mentally unstable enough not to have been worthy of prosecution. The true villain was Nifong, who has been punished for his malfeasance.
HGB
Anyway, its long past due to get rid of these political movements masquerading as academic disciplines.
Imagine if there were a Department of Firearm Studies. All the professors were a card-carrying member of GOA, NRA, etc. The professors' resumes consisted mostly of shooting competitions and lobbying on behalf of the NRA and little, if any, scholarship. The only reading materials were those supporting an absolute right to own Stinger missles. Nothing was assigned supporting a mitia-centric view or a more limited individual rights view. Any student who dissented from the professors' orthodoxy would get a failing grade or be ridiculed and ostracized. Students who wrote elected officials to oppose gun control would get bonus points toward their grade and class credit would be given for wearing an empty holster to support guns on campus. The professors would also be de facto employees of the NRA, albeit paid get paid by the university, who spent as least as much time lobbying and organizing rallies as teaching or researching.
That would be the right-wing equivilent of the typical Womens' Studies Department and the like. Don't hold your breath waiting for this to happen. Nor should it happen. There should be a line between the political and the scholarly.
I think the justification for this is that the meta-narrative (as Whit calls it) that white privileged males are, by definition, exploiters, most others are their victims, and that this narrative is more important than the mere guilt or innocence of the LAX players or the reality of what actually happened. After all, even if these white male LAX players didn't actually rape this wacked out black woman, plenty of other white males have raped innocent black women, and that is more important than the truth here of who actually did what to whom.
K.C. Johnson actually discusses this issue in his book. Over the last 20 years or so, Duke has tried in increase its scholarly reputation by hiring famous scholars away from other universities.
However, hiring famous scholars in fields like biology, law, engineering, computer science, etc is very expensive. Duke chose to do their hiring on the cheap, sticking to humanities departments where salaries are lower. Sadly, a large number of those who are currently regarded as notable or famous humanities scholars come from Marxist/Gender studies/Race studies/etc backgrounds.
Every school has some of the crazies on its faculty. But according to KC Johnson, Duke's hiring practices have left it with a considerably greater percentage of such faculty than comparable schools.
Holy cow. I can't believe I had forgotten that Social Text was the journal Sokal published in. That is the icing on the cake of this whole thing. Bravo for reminding us.
What a complete scam.
If every professor/department of 'studies' were eliminated following tonight's five o'clock news, the result would be to ratchet up the quality of higher education.
Even in death, Frege is cautious with language.
Ditto for the Marxism observation. The Old Left was incomprehensible until one read just enough Marx to know what the terms meant. (Substructure, class-for-itself, Lumpenproletariat). Then you could debate those people.
The New Left brought in Marcuse, after which it became increasingly questionable whether things that academics wrote actually meant something.
But the Post-structuralist Left makes a fetish of incomprehensible jargon. I'll let them convince me that their work has merit on a case-by-case basis. Otherwise, like Frege, I'll leave it at "nonsense."
Nick
"I wonder if it was the first time some of them experienced being told they didn't make any sense and had nothing to say."
Reminded me of the report that a Dartmouth professor has threatened to sue her students.
http://thedartmouth.com/2008/04/28/news/classactionsuit/
For one thing, when a student disagreed with her and the others clapped, she had to cancel class and says she was "facing intolerance of ideas and intolerance of freedom of expression."
It's just my guess but I do believe that as a rule, certain members of the academic community are not accustomed to criticism and do not take it well, at all.
But apparently sane enough to graduate from college.
The seeds of this hoax were planted about 15 years ago by then president Nan Keohane (a feminist) and Stanley Fish -- former czar (I mean chair) of the English department. The current administration has increased the hiring of cutting edge "scholars" in race/gender/class "studies". Such "scholars" have been showered with resources and authority. Women's Studies and Black Studies were turned into departments. They were recently given new, multi-million dollar offices. Some of them control the administration (three academic deans).
One of the real villains behind the hoax, Karla Holloway, is the former Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences.
Unless one has lived under censorship, it is hard to grasp the chill factor that the G88 created among the students and few faculty who disagreed with them.
The other remarkable fact -- particularly relevent to this blog -- is that, other than James Coleman, the law school remained silent. However, they were busy speaking out against environmental "crimes" and the conditions at Guantanamo Bay.
Well, she may be going into Women's Studies.
www.tomladshaw.com/images/BIFF_TOM_PR2.jpg
Oh, no professor. That would deprive us the spectacle of people who fail to grasp why their stature diminishes the deeper they dig.
It is with absolutely perfect irony that one of the most aggregious examples of the application of this relativist drivel that Duke was so responsible for popularizing among our universities...to their incalculable detriment, should visit itself upon...yes, Duke itself. Of course, major elements of their faculty would assert with perfect seriousness that mere facts had no relevance to...the "narrative," or the "metanarrative," or other academically fashionable terms of obfuscation that all reduce to "what I say and think trumps anything that actually happens or that anyone else says." Perfect narcissism, dishonesty, cowardice and prejudice. Hate speech shabbily disguised as deep intellectual insight and moral posturing. The proud legacy of Stanley Fish and Duke itself.
Did Prof. Lindgren actually read the article or just take Johnson's hatchet job as gospel? Wiegman, Lubiano, and Hardt make some dubious claims in the article and plenty of debatable points. I'd think Lindgren could manage his own critique--it would surely be more informative than Johnson's.
Incidentally, it's completely absurd to say that Steven Baldwin was forced to apologize. He's a tenured professor. He came out with his rhetorical guns blazing. What kind of force is a letter to the campus paper from another professor? Lots of people are convinced that Duke's PC stormtroopers ganged up on Baldwin. The only evidence anyone can come up with is one measly letter to the Duke Chronicle. But when you have such a perfect story, who needs evidence?
These identity studies tyrants rule the roost in most humanities departments; indeed, many times the entire faculty quakes before them. Their use of their exquisitely cultivated victim status render them immune to real criticism in the gossipy little world of the college campus. They are used to getting their way through intimidation, not the merits of their arguments.
The bloggers are outside the tyrant's tantrum range, and are impervious to the standard intimidation tools used to silence the opposition. And let's face it... the only way these frauds can win is by stifling the enemy.
In the Afterlife of the Duke Case is nothing but a scream of impotent rage.
No, because what he writes is true.
What "ideological nail"? He supports Obama.
Perhaps the "ideological nail" you mean is the collectivist group think that Johnson identifies as a root cause of the hoax. Naming that as a cause does qualify him as an expert because he is right.
As opposed to the reasoning by the gang of 88 or the folks at the Bat Cave? If you're going to throw out accusations, at least have the guts to point them out.
This fiasco has been a disaster to the academic Left, and again it seems the response is "move along, nothing to see here."
Two words: Useful idiocy.
So what would the half decent undergraduate find embarrassing? Some specific quotes and cites to Professor Johnson's poor scholarship would help make the case. However, none are offered. Actually, I think the reason the Klan of 88 is so irate, and members of it like Lubiano have requested Johnson not contact them is because their own words confirm that Johnson has, in fact, put their incompetence in plain view for anyone who can read English at an 8th grade level.
Professor Johnson, unlike most of the 88 faculty and the administrators close to this frame up, understands that when one makes an error, one should acknowledge and correct it. He has done this routinely throughout the operation of his blog. I have yet to see evidence of that from Lubiano et al. Instead, they continue to try to justify their behavior.
One does not need a Ph.D. from Harvard to understand what Duke was doing. One simply needs to read and comprehend English at an 8th grade level, and understand some simple concepts like truth and facts. The problem with much of the postmodern theory utilized by Fish and his cronies is that it dismisses the existence of facts and truth. Relativism and literary theory are possibly useful tools for the study of literature, but they are inadequate for the understanding of any fact based reality. That is why literary theory and postmodernism are inappropriate for the study of history, government, politics, the natural sciences, and so on. People like Lubiano who try to do this are easily shown to be talking fashionable nonsense. This is not difficult, except to people who believe that there are no facts, and one interpretation is as valid as any other. Like the 40 something year old graduate student who claimed that there was no such thing as a fact, just cultural constructs. Someone pointed out that we were in a third story room,and that anyone trying to prove that gravity was a cultural construct was likely to be seriously injured or killed by stepping out of the window to prove the point. Most rational people understand this, and do not have to have this explained to them. Some, like the person in question, and some of Duke's finest, simply prove Orwell's comment that some ideas are so stupid only an intellectual could take them seriously.
It is interesting to see so much enthusiasm for the academic fashionable nonsense of the Duke threesome's article in Social Text, while recollecting that within the past couple of months, academics have been horrified by the idea that someone would commit academic incompetence in the field of biology by discussing Intelligent Design. (For the record, I absolutely agree that ID is not science, and has no business being taught in biology - but if the theology department wants to make that claim, that's their right and good luck to them). Biologists, correctly, point out that ID is not something that can be argued from a scientific understanding. Professor Johnson is a historian, and he is pointing out that the attempts to argue the understanding of history that Lubiano et al offer fails to meet the norms of historical scholarship. Now, Mr. Mr. Zimmerman, if you want to show how Professor Johnson's analysis of the Duke Lacrosse frame fails to measure up as history, please be my guest. But, let me point out that so far, no one has been able to do it. Least of all the faculty and administrators at Duke. Arguments to authority won't work. This is a fact-based field, unlike literary criticism. Don't confuse the two, thank you.
Would you be Robert Zimmerman, Visiting Professor of Music at Duke? The Reharmonizer posts at Durham in Wonderland and the Reharmonizer blog seem familiar. If I am mistaking you for the music professor at Duke, my apologies. But, it certainly seems possible, because your defense of Duke seems a lot like "Reharmonizer."