I have a suggestion that you start writing in plain English- after years of academics I cannot follow your blogs with the ease that is supposed to be found in blogging...your writing is unclear and muddled.

Professor of education, perhaps?

It's true that this is not the clearest post I've ever written (it has too many parenthetical remarks). In fact, the post is almost self-parodying. But it can't possibly be that hard to read.

This might be one spot where I really am to the left of you, Paul, because I find it odd that you find it odd that racial issues would come up in the discussion of the first African-American president in the university's history being attacked in unprecedented terms by a mostly white faculty, including charges of laziness & dishonesty, which are classic stereotyping charges lodged against black people for many, many years. When such a description of events presents itself (and it is in no way a factually inaccurate description of the situation), then the spectre of race cannot help but raise its ugly head. And I interpret Prof. Brown's letter (thank you for the link to it) as saying, basically: this shouldn't be about race, but when the situation looks this way, it's wise to take at least some basic precautions to make sure it doesn't even remotely look like it's about race. (Perception and politics are important, and I can easily see how both can get icky in this particular case.) And, he's arguing, the right way to do this would be to have some prominent black faculty involved in the protest in some significant way.

I'm inclined to think he's mostly right, but has overstated his case a bit, such that it does support Paul's reading of the arugment as having "the minor premise that the African-American professors at IUB have an inherent prerogative to grant legitimacy, as a community, to critiques of President Herber". I would prefer to read it as: those professors have the capacity to defuse a possible threat of illegitimacy that the critique is threatened with by its circumstances. Not granting legitimacy, but keeping it from disappearing. Stated that way, I would think it fairly unproblematic. But it does seem that he doesn't quite state it that way, at least not consistently.