The whole point of the KC Johnson lecture was to spark debate, so students should still treat him respectfully, even if they disagree with him.
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To the Editor,
“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts,” the late Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan insisted. The conflicting responses on The Post’s editorial pages to Professor KC Johnson’s recent talk on due process and campus sexual assault brought Moynihan to mind. For much of the disagreement among the columnists and letter-writers turns on what Johnson actually argued in that talk. Readers of The Post can judge for themselves, since a video of the entire event is now available at The George Washington Forum’s website. Opinions may still vary about the merits of his argument, but the facts regarding the content of that argument are unambiguous.
KC Johnson — a distinguished American historian and a self-described “registered and very partisan Democrat” and two-time Obama donor — addressed a controversial subject in recent American history last Monday night. And The George Washington Forum, which sponsored that talk, is about bringing speakers like him to campus to address sometimes charged political, economic, social and cultural issues. But the Forum is also about promoting a mode of argument. And that mode avoids ad hominem, deals with first principles, employs reason, and marshals concrete evidence. The aim, put another way, is to model what it looks like to treat your intellectual opponents as you yourself would want to be treated. That KC Johnson did just that during his visit to Ohio University is evident for all to see in the video of his lecture.
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Robert G. Ingram is a history professor at Ohio University and the Director of The George Washington Forum on American Ideas, Politics and Institutions.
