More about the Nava hoax

As Michael notes, Francisco Nava faked, and lied about, being assaulted for his conservative views, thereby joining the depressingly-not-small rogues' gallery of hate-crime fakers.  This is sad, and bad.  That said, preening pieces like this one in The Nation are, in my view . . . not particularly helpful.

To be clear:  I'm not, at all, making a Duke-esque "it does not matter if the lacrosse players were railroaded because the charges, though false and destructive, brought to the surface important and often neglected issues of race, gender, class, and justice" argument.  (If only Duke's "Gang of 88" were as quick, or even as willing, to confess error as the "conservatives" at Princeton have been!)  There's no excuse or justification for what Nava did.  More specifically, it does not excuse or justify what Nava did that, at many of our most elite universities, The Nation's sarcasm and Nava's hoax notwitstanding, there is often a "double standard" that disadvantages "conservative" ideas, students, speakers, academic-job-seekers, and faculty.

It is also too bad that that hoax provided an occasion for The Nation writer's detour into cut-and-pasted conspiracy theorizing about Robby George, the James Madison Program, and "right-wing foundations and a shadowy web of front groups for the Catholic cult known as Opus Dei."  (The writer forgot the albino monks in Prof. George's basement!)  If one of the lessons of l'affair Nava is that the pitched-culture-war character of many on-campus (and off) debates is not particularly conducive to careful debate and enlightening conversation, this lesson seems entirely lost on the folks at The Nation.

Finally, it could be that the writer has some facts not quite right.  He writes:

George also congratulated himself for his own calmness in the crisis and sharp-wittedness in uncovering the fraud. "Within seventy-two hours," he said, "we were able to expose this as a hoax."

But of course, Nava's claims were never "exposed" by George or his conservative campus allies. Nava had reportedly confessed to his lying under police questioning. Only hours before George celebrated the "good sense" he and university administrators displayed, he had accused Princeton of upholding a liberal double standard. And while Princeton police investigated dubious details of the alleged assault, George broadcast his confidence in Nava's melodramatic account.

This post, over at First Things, presents a different account (scroll to the bottom).