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Last week Henry Farrell wrote about the strange piece by Naomi Schaefer Riley that recently appeared Chronicle of Higher Education. Riley, a former Wall Street Journal editor, wrote in the Chronicle that, “dissertations being offered by the best and the brightest of black-studies graduate students… [are] a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap.” And then the Chronicle fired her. Despite a certain obvious hypocrisy on the part of the newspaper, this ended probably about as well as it should have.
But many conservatives are complaining. Oh the shame. The liberal media. William Jacobson writes at Legal Insurrection that,
This sort of cowardly behavior is all too common. Witness the corporations who run at the slightest hint of a Color of Change or Media Matters boycott. We are at a very perilous period in our society in which social media, a tool which could and should encourage the exchange of idea, serves as a tool to shut down and silence ideas. Conservatives better wake up to this threat, and soon.
The justification the Chronicle used for getting rid of her was admittedly questionable. Chronicle editor Liz McMillen explained that “Ms. Riley’s blog posting did not meet The Chronicle’s basic editorial standards for reporting and fairness in opinion articles. As a result, we have asked Ms. Riley to leave the Brainstorm blog.”
The Brainstorm blog, however, is basically a section for random musings, often unsupported by facts or evidence. What, exactly, are these “standards for reporting and fairness” to which Riley’s article did not conform?
The real reason, of course, was that the readers of the Chronicle objected. Some 6500 people signed an online petition to get her fired. Riley, sensibly, argues that she was let go from the part-time gig at the paper because “the Academic Mob rules” and the paper wouldn’t “encourage wide discussion.”
Well sure she was fired by an academic mob, but that’s the Chronicle’s readership. It’s a trade publication for academia. Obviously such people are going to object to a blanket dismissal of an intellectual discipline devoted to studying the experience of a historically disadvantaged ethnic group. The Chronicle should listen to its mob; the mob pays for the Chronicle.
Also come on, your blog post was crap. As Hamilton Nolan writes at Gawker:
She is also guilty of an offense that constitutes a very legitimate reason for a writer to be fired: being stupid. Let’s look at a bit of content from her infamous blog post:
But topping the list in terms of sheer political partisanship and liberal hackery is La TaSha B. Levy. According to the Chronicle, “Ms. Levy is interested in examining the long tradition of black Republicanism, especially the rightward ideological shift it took in the 1980s after the election of Ronald Reagan. Ms. Levy’s dissertation argues that conservatives like Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas, John McWhorter, and others have ‘played one of the most-significant roles in the assault on the civil-rights legacy that benefited them.’” The assault on civil rights? Because they don’t favor affirmative action they are assaulting civil rights?
Well, assuming that the civil rights movement benefited black intellectuals in the academy, then yes, people like Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas, and John McWhorter can reasonably be described as intellectually assaulting the civil rights legacy that benefited them. Yes, they can. That, too, seems very easy to grasp, in a way that cannot be automatically refuted by typing rhetorical questions.
What’s a good reason to fire a writer? When he makes statements that offends the readers. What’s a really good reason to fire a writer? When he pens really poorly argued pieces.
Granted, all writers, even good ones, do this sometimes. I’ve written a number of pieces I’m not so proud of. The thing with blogging is that some posts are major achievements of rhetoric and evidence, and some are just exercises in spewing your opinion on the web.
But when you do a crappy job, you’ve got to be prepared to be held accountable for it.
Sure, if she’d written bad posts that didn’t offend anyone she’d probably still be employed, but that’s why someone gets fired; because he does something really annoying and supporters can’t make a compelling case that he’s otherwise good enough to keep around. That’s just how it goes. [Image via]
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Marktropolis on May 09, 2012 6:10 PM:
The reality is that Riley has been writing pretty bad piece for the Chronicle for a while. This one, however, hit a nerve. That and the racism (intended or not) was palpable.
But I think you also need to read her response to the critics at http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/black-studies-part-2-a-response-to-critics/46401
I think that post more than the other sealed the deal. Basically she said, I know I offended a bunch of people and I don't care. Her inability to consider the possibility that what she had written could have been construed as racist wasn't even a concern.
Quaker in a Basement on May 09, 2012 7:09 PM:
In her incendiary blog post, Riley wrote:
Riley is going for hyperbole here (I think), but she actually describes an important point: Black peoples' experience is generally ignored in a particular field of study? Well of course that's racism. It's a textbook definition.
Riley can argue that natural birth literature is an inappropriate field of study. She could even argue that racism within this area of study is of no practical consequence.
Instead, she vents her pretend outrage that anyone would care enough to write about the subject. (We don't learn from Riley whether the degree candidate in question asserted racism at all. Riley simply assumes it.)
Dissertations often treat arcane subjects in agonizing depth. For Riley to single out three living, breathing students for ridicule because they happen to be pursuing degrees in black studies is inexcusable.
Simon on May 09, 2012 7:39 PM:
I happen to think the subjects of those dissertations sound quite interesting.
Alex Y on May 10, 2012 3:27 AM:
And I happen to think that the subjects of those dissertations entirely validate Riley's point.
Granted, "the mob" pays the bills at CHE. But let's not kid ourselves: as Riley points out in her response at WSJ, the founders and chief defenders of African American Studies as a "discipline" have openly acknowledged that their purpose is political, not scholarly (whatever could possibly be meant by "scholarship" in this context).
As an academic in the humanities, I instinctively recoil at a lot of the anti-intellectual claptrap spewed by professionally ignorant right-wing commentators. But the idea that Riley's arguments were "stupid" is simply wrong. She identified a sore spot, and pushed on it in a way that angered a lot of people. Perhaps she could have been more skillful; then again, given the vitriol of the response against her, my guess is that no amount of skillfulness would have lessened the impact, because in the minds of her detractors to criticize African American Studies as currently practiced is ipso facto to be a racist. That is the real problem here.
Daniel Buck on May 10, 2012 6:02 AM:
As I recall, Riley conceded that she had not read any of the dissertations she slammed. For that she deserves an F.
Writing about higher education issues and while having done no primary research does seem like the "sort of cowardly behavior," to borrow Mr. Jacobson's phrase, that "is all to common." How can conservatives "wake up to this threat" if they in fact are perpetrating it?
Sgt. Gym Bunny on May 10, 2012 11:32 AM:
So, I wanted to see for myself if Riley's article was as bad everyone says that it is. And, yeah, it was a pretty horrid exercise is condescension and dismissiveness. And I say this a black person who tends to be wary of a lot of the soft humanities (gender, identity studies, and such), but only as a matter of methodology (I like numbers and statistics and graphs and logic-y type stuff). I would only have scholarly beef if I felt a particular study had shody evidence and logic. But I still think that the best of these fields are important and can really deepen our understanding of society.
But Riley has the audacity to try to define what "legitimate Black Studies should comprise: crime, education, and family issues "that don’t begin and end with blame the white man", as if she's an expert on the issue. I seriously doubt that she read any of the dissertions she singled out (they're entire books, no?). Does she have a cache of evidence as to the lack of utility that Black Studies provides? Do Black Studies graduates overwhelmingly become low-wage waitresses or turn into paranoid conspiracy theorists? Is their collective IQ 69? Do they fail to turn out graduates and alumni donors? Nope. Riley's argument is essentially, They study weird shit, and they're all liberal lefties who hate The Man, so let's scrap the program.
And, yeah, as mentioned by another commenter, dissertations are obscure. I work at a grad school, and I have seen some titles that have raised both eyebrows. Do I outright dismiss it? Well, it must be interesting to somebody somewhere if someone was able to write 500 pages about it...
trog69 on May 10, 2012 12:06 PM:
I would certainly defend Ms. Riley's right to voice her opinion on the relevance of the papers, if she'd just taken a little bit of time to look through them with more than just a jaundiced "are you kidding me?" attitude, which is seemingly what she started and ended with.
Instead, it looks as if she just wanted to tweak some noses. Mission Accomplished!
Bloix on May 10, 2012 12:19 PM:
Riley belittled three young scholars by name in a post that was intended to be read by their prospective colleagues and employers. This malicious effort to destroy the careers of three young people at the the beginning of their careers was a sign that Riley had no right to the prestige of the CHE brand.