Naomi Schaefer Riley has been bumped from the Chronicle of Higher Education’s group blog for sharing her thoughts on black studies scholarships:
You’ll have to forgive the lateness but I just got around to reading The Chronicle’s recent piece on the young guns of black studies. If ever there were a case for eliminating the discipline, the sidebar explaining some of the dissertations being offered by the best and the brightest of black-studies graduate students has made it. What a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap. The best that can be said of these topics is that they’re so irrelevant no one will ever look at them.
That’s what I would say about Ruth Hayes’ dissertation, “‘So I Could Be Easeful’: Black Women’s Authoritative Knowledge on Childbirth.” It began because she “noticed that nonwhite women’s experiences were largely absent from natural-birth literature, which led me to look into historical black midwifery.” How could we overlook the nonwhite experience in “natural birth literature,” whatever the heck that is? It’s scandalous and clearly a sign that racism is alive and well in America, not to mention academia.
The Chronicle received innumerable letters protesting the publication of her racially insensitive article. For his part, Rod Dreher can’t help wondering “how she manages to keep up her racist chops, give that she’s been married for some time to a black man.”
Read Naomi’s article here.
May 8th, 2012 | 11:19 am
Actually, I think the history of midwives in the black community is a story worth documenting, if not yet done well. That part of a culture says a lot about the priorities of a culture at a crisis point in the lives of both mothers and children, especially in a time when the survival of both was not guaranteed. I recall a seminal history about Patty Sessions, a 19th Century Mormon midwife. I believe it won some writing awards.
May 8th, 2012 | 12:26 pm
Black Studies, Women’s Studies, LGBT Studies, all part of a design to make higher education ‘relevant’ to the contemporary world. In the meantime, there was a recent report that Political Science departments at some of the nation’s most prestigious universities no longer require their students to read ‘The Federalist Papers.’
And the decline continues apace…..
May 8th, 2012 | 1:00 pm
I question the integrity of disciplines that end in the word “Studies”. They so often seem to be self-affirming one-sided apologetics, not subject to rigorous criticism. I wonder how many will be cut due to budget problems.
May 8th, 2012 | 1:20 pm
Gosh, that article’s content and tone sound rather common place to me. Academics talk like this all the time about the positions in papers they don’t respect and no one loses their job over it.
What blushing violets must there be in this field to demand someone’s job in response to the mocking tone of a few paragraphs like this? If black studies are really important and significant it can withstand such assaults by merely pointing out its achievements. Of course, if those achievements are difficult to point to, then perhaps demanding a critic must be silenced is the only rational response.
Higher education is heading for a reckoning, and the day is coming soon wherein many cushy academic positions are going to have to justify their existence. There will be much gnashing of teeth on that day and perhaps this is a dry run at how to resist the day of reckoning.
May 8th, 2012 | 2:04 pm
According to the best information I could come up with, there are only nine universities that offer doctorates in Black Studies and only thirteen in Women’s studies. About the same number of college and universities (250) offer undergraduate degrees in Women’s Studies and Black Studies. That’s somewhere (very roughly) around 10% of colleges and universities.
The ten most popular college majors are
Business Management and Administration 8%
General Business 5%
Accounting 5%
Nursing 4%
Psychology 4%
Elementary Education 4%
Marketing and Marketing Research 3%
General Education 3%
Communications 3%
It doesn’t seem likely to me that Black Studies or Women’s Studies would be significantly dragging down American higher education even if they are as worthless as some believe.
I don’t think it’s a matter of how academics talk among themselves. I think Naomi Schaefer Riley’s post needs to be judged by the standards of Chronicle of Higher Education, which it seems to have been. It certainly seemed “racially insensitive” to me. I agree with Raymond Takashi Swenson that the story of black midwives seems well worth telling. I think there are a great many areas of academic study in which someone outside the field (probably in it, too) would find many of the dissertation titles and synopses risible.
May 8th, 2012 | 2:46 pm
Is it not very nice, i.e., impolite, to seize on titles of new dissertations that sound fairly vacuous and insignificant, ones offered up by a let’s-promote-black-studies-puff-piece as examples of hot new research, and then criticize them without having read them (although it looks like Riley might have read the abstracts)? And to name the names of young post-docs in doing so? To only devote 500 words to the issue because it is a blog-post?
It isn’t very nice. It isn’t polite. It isn’t ideal. But news-flash, my leftist, liberal, and moderate-so-called academic colleagues, it might just reflect, in an abbreviated and rhetorical way, what your (very very few–to your shame) conservative colleagues actually think about what typically goes on in most “studies” departments, and, I’m sorry to say, in most non-”studies” departments to boot.
And instead of being able to hear this, to deal with a larger argument that’s presented in a more vivid and cutting way due it to it being a blog post, and to respond to it with argument, we get the mau-mau-ing of Naomi Schaefer Riley? And the Chronicle is weak spineless enough to fire Ms. Schaefer?
News-flash, folks: people in academia actually disagree on things. Some of us really, truly, sincerely think that others in the club, don’t deserve the jobs, programs, courses, that they have. That cuts all ways. Riley has an opinion about black studies programs–she voices it in a blog-style manner. Just as in my discipline of political science some people feel that political theory classes are no longer very necessary, which is mean and nasty and career-endangering to myself, there really truly are academics, at any given college, who honestly judge that say, 30%-40% of the administrators should be fired, and several programs gutted. They may be polite to their co-workers whom they think should be fired, but their judgment remains what it is. And sometimes it must be expressed.
A college can’t pay for one thing, without starving another. That’s life. So black studies has to justify itself like anything else. It has to hear some sharp criticism…indeed it should welcome such criticism as an opportunity to demonstrate its ability to answer it impressively.
But what’s happened over at the Chronicle’s comment section is, by and large, sheer mobbery–and that does not reflect well on black studies, or at least upon one subset of its defenders. (I pity the moderates in those departments–I recall a fine one I once took an Afro-American studies class from.)
And for the Chronicle to give into it! Beneath contempt.
If things continue as they are, by the year 2092, American universities will be as predictably “red” and “blue” as our media outlets now are. A horrible thing to contemplate, but the 40% or os of America that is conservative will only put up with egregious mistreatment of their voices by legacy academia for so long. There’ll wind up being a Hillsdale in every other zip-code.
May 8th, 2012 | 3:58 pm
This seems to be the result of the upsurge in these types of niche disciplines. Taboo topics, free from criticism. Her original post didn’t criticize black studies based on race; rather her point was that this type of increasingly myopic focus renders academia more and more remote from the experiences of most Americans. I got a chuckle out of her criticism of the graduate students as “oppressed.” It reminded me of my time at Yale when the graduate students there took to the picket lines demanding the right to unionize. It seemed to me that only graduate students with nothing else to do could protest so much.
May 8th, 2012 | 5:07 pm
Well, here’s one of the comments, which 104 people “liked.” It is in response to someone saying, “Present your research.”
I don’t know where this guy lives, but in New York City we are well aware that young black men (and Latinos) are stopped and frisked far, far out of proportion to their numbers in the population. I consider this guy’s comment blatantly racist.
There is, of course, a problem with Black Studies, Women’s Studies, and LGBT Studies that there isn’t with political science, and that is that much of the criticism of those disciplines will be motivated by racism, misogyny, or homophobia, but many of their critics will consider it “phantom,” just as the commenter did above. Racism, misogyny, and homophobia are all very real, but pointing them out often causes such scoffing from certain quarters that it is generally wise, in most arguments, to avoid saying anything about them. This is not, of course, to say that all criticism of, say, Black Studies is motivated by racism. But for people who are racists, it’s a pretty good bet that they have no use for Black Studies as an academic discipline and will be very much inclined to mock topics for dissertations.
There is something I call “playing-the-race-card” card. It’s explosive to accuse someone of racism in an argument, but it is also explosive for someone to claim they are being accused of racism.
May 8th, 2012 | 5:25 pm
Carl Eric Scott,
You flubbed this one. Here’s Alan Jacobs, nailing it: “I know and like Naomi, but I think her post was way out of line — especially written for a periodical run by and for academics. If there’s one thing that all academics ought to be able to agree on, it’s that you don’t criticize stuff you haven’t read. You just don’t, not ever. And while many of Naomi’s critics were definitely demanding political correctness, there were also many who made legitimate complaints about the bad form of declaring whole book-length works (and the programs they come from) worthless on the basis of two- or three-sentence descriptions. I don’t know what went on behind the scenes at the Chronicle, but I suspect that Naomi would still have that gig if she had copped to the legitimate criticisms. Instead, in her follow-up she doubled down on her original post. That was disappointing, and made it really hard for anyone who wants to uphold basic intellectual standards in academia to support her.”
May 8th, 2012 | 6:43 pm
“I think Naomi Schaefer Riley’s post needs to be judged by the standards of Chronicle of Higher Education, which it seems to have been. It certainly seemed “racially insensitive” to me.” What are those ‘Chronicle’ standards regarding offensiveness? Congratulations for being consistent once again….
May 8th, 2012 | 6:50 pm
Actually, I think the history of midwives in the black community is a story worth documenting, if not yet done well.
I don’t know if it’s relevant or not, but I do think it would be better if it were done within the history department.
History has been doing a great deal of expanding into domestic issues. There’s no reason why black people need to be segregated.
May 8th, 2012 | 6:55 pm
David Nickol True scholarship is incommunicable, true scholars rare… Most of us are pseudo-scholars
I don’t know what you’re quoting, or even if you’re quoting (format looks funny, but no attribution), but I disagree with it strongly, and I don’t think it does any favors to a vocation that is already poorly understood.
Black Studies is a worthwhile scholarly endeavor. I don’t doubt that real scholarship goes on in Black Studies departments. That doesn’t mean Naomi doesn’t have a point, though (the midwifery one was a terrible example, but the one about black Republicans another story). It’s a shame that she reacted so poorly to a piece in the Chronicle that chose to highlight these dissertations, and that the Chronicle doesn’t have a stronger respect for controversial ideas.
Such is the state of academic research these days. The disciplines multiply. The publication topics become more and more irrelevant and partisan. No one reads them. And the people whom we expect to offer undergraduates a broad liberal-arts education (in return for billions of dollars from parents and taxpayers) never get trained to do so. Instead the ivory tower pushes them further and further into obscurity. — Naomi Schaefer Riley
May 8th, 2012 | 6:57 pm
I think it’s ridiculous she was fired. But I also think she misfired.
People outside the academy are understandably unfamiliar with the little but important mores of academic life, and Ms. Riley ran afoul of one of them. She criticized recent doctoral dissertations rather than the work of mature scholars in the field.
Do you know what percentage of humanities dissertations could be ridiculed? Think higher.
May 8th, 2012 | 7:19 pm
Thoughtful, serious criticism of the academy is needed. And, it is true that thoughtful, serious criticism that doesn’t conform to contemporary, secular orthodox is often sneered at. But, Schaefer Riley didn’t offer thoughtful, serious criticism. She took a bunch of dissertation abstracts and made snarky, insensitive, and (frankly) stupid comments about those abstracts. (I can only imagine the posts that would crop up here if someone at CHE made fun of theology abstracts involving the spiration Holy Spirit or pneumatology, etc.) Conservatives who defend Schaefer Riley are in the wrong– intellectually, morally, and pragmatically.
May 8th, 2012 | 7:51 pm
“Do you know what percentage of humanities dissertations could be ridiculed? Think higher.” If you look at Riley’s work prior to her “racially insensitive” blog entry you will find that she was equally critical of esoteric work in the humanities and elsewhere…. She made the mistake of touching the third rail of academic life: race/gender-centric “scholarship.”
May 8th, 2012 | 8:08 pm
In a post calling on us to “read the dissertations” to learn “the most persuasive case for eliminating black studies programs,” Ms. Riley passes judgment on dissertations she has declined to read and apparently has no intention of reading. She instead relies on the titles and brief descriptions of three unfinished projects from graduate students working in a single, brand-new Black Studies program (Northwestern U.).
Doctoral research in any field is by nature directed toward experts in that field. For a layperson to declare a field invalid based on her impression of dissertation titles makes as much sense as a jury condemning a defendant based on whether they like the lawyer’s haircut.
We do not, after all, judge the legitimacy of economics, mathematics, history, or theology based on how well a particular topic in those disciplines polls with the general public. Not being economists, mathematicians, historians, or theologians, most people are ill-equipped to adjudicate such projects’ merits.
Black Studies is an interdisciplinary field. Each project draws on a number of discrete areas of scholarship. As such, Black Studies projects can, should be, and are judged by experts from these various fields. Are the projects in question here under-researched? Badly argued? Disconnected to related scholarship? Passed by virtue of political correctness rather than by metrics of scholarly quality?
Ms. Riley certainly provides no reason to think so. All she offers is her first-glance, layperson’s impression of these topics, as if that were enough to justify dismissal of Black Studies programs altogether (Ms. Riley’s post makes no mention of “studies”-type fields in general, only Black Studies).
Perhaps there is a serious conversation to be had about the integrity and aims of Black Studies. I do not see evidence that Ms. Riley made an effort to start that conversation in her blog post. The original article–not, mind you, the companion-piece sidebar from which Ms. Riley drew her information–actually does raise and address some key questions about the identity and history of Black Studies programs.
But Ms. Riley does not mention–let alone question–any of the points in that original article. She does not critique or quote from any of the senior scholars mentioned in the article. No, instead she cherry-picks bare descriptions of student projects to conclude that Black Studies programs are full of “left-wing victimization claptrap.”
I am ambivalent about the wisdom of the Chronicle’s decision to discontinue Ms. Riley’s contributions. I am sorry that some here have experienced judgmental attitudes from left-leaning academics in the past.
But neither of these factors ameliorates the poor quality and bad faith on display in Ms. Riley’s post. Blog or not, sincerely felt or not, someone being paid to produce work for a professional journal’s site can and should do better.
May 8th, 2012 | 9:20 pm
David Nickol,
Are you a real flesh and blood human being? Because sometimes I think you are just a algorithm that generates the most ridiculous liberal comments possible, to wit:
“I don’t know where this guy lives, but in New York City we are well aware that young black men (and Latinos) are stopped and frisked far, far out of proportion to their numbers in the population.”
Did it ever occur to your warped liberal mind that the reason they are stopped and frisked “out of proportion” is that they deserve to be stopped and frisked “out of proportion” because they are criminal “out of proportion”? No, of course it didn’t — because you labor under the false belief that every single human being has exactly the same characteristics and qualities.
As for Ms. Riley and the Chronicle, let’s all be serious here — sometimes you just don’t need to read an entire dissertation to criticize the subject matter. Sometimes, even academic subject matter is an appropriate topic of ridicule. Here is Riley in context:
“If ever there were a case for eliminating the discipline [Black Studies], the sidebar explaining some of the dissertations being offered by the best and the brightest of black-studies graduate students has made it. What a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap. The best that can be said of these topics is that they’re so irrelevant no one will ever look at them.
That’s what I would say about Ruth Hayes’ dissertation, “‘So I Could Be Easeful’: Black Women’s Authoritative Knowledge on Childbirth.” It began because she “noticed that nonwhite women’s experiences were largely absent from natural-birth literature, which led me to look into historical black midwifery.” How could we overlook the nonwhite experience in “natural birth literature,” whatever the heck that is?”
Look at what Riley is criticizing — both the subject of “natural birth literature” and presumably the idea that black women can have “authoritative knowledge” of the subject. Should scholars be studying these matters? Let me help you and everyone in history departments, women’s studies departments, and black studies departments all across the country answer that question: no.
May 8th, 2012 | 9:43 pm
What is their to be “ambivalent” about Riley’s firing . . . since when are blog writers fired for stating an opinion? Blog writers opine every day on various topics for which they may not have direct access or even seek direct access. How many bloggers have written about Obamacare without reading the 1000+ pages of the health care bill — should they be fired? Bloggers write about all sorts of issues related to national security even when they lack access to critical information that is classified — should they be fired? The fact is that Riley was fired because she hurt the feelings of certain groups quick to hoist the ‘racist’ petard…
May 8th, 2012 | 10:16 pm
I enjoyed reading these comments but wept at the reality that the sentiments expressed in some were indications that education and intelligence do not cure racism.
I was reminded of Shakespeares 94 sonnet
But if that flower with base infection meet,
The basest weed outbraves his dignity:
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.
May 9th, 2012 | 12:13 am
I don’t know what you’re quoting, or even if you’re quoting (format looks funny, but no attribution), but I disagree with it strongly, and I don’t think it does any favors to a vocation that is already poorly understood.
Jack Perry,
Sorry, I had meant to link to the source and forgot. It is a quote from Aspects of the Novel by E. M. Forster. My point was not at all to denigrate Black Studies, Women’s Studies, or LGBT Studies. But a tremendous amount of scholarly work gets published, and how much of it is a real contribution to the field? Probably not very much. And here we’re talking about dissertations. Probably only a few dissertations, even by people who were brilliant and became famous scholars, have been important or enduring works.
May 9th, 2012 | 2:16 am
Well, it’s nice to know that for every navel-gazing black studies major here in America there’s probably about 25,000 Chinese math and engineering majors. They need to be productive so they can keep buying our debt, as I understand. It’s nice we have this relationship, where China keeps giving us money, and we keep spending it on dissertations on how our grandparents were victims, green energy, and promoting sodomy. I’m sure this can continue indefinitely into the future.
(By the way, David Nickols, did it occur to you as well that the people who called the police were themselves minorities? So what you seem to be suggesting, that the police shouldn’t stop minorities as much, could be interpreted as a suggestion that the police stop protecting minority neighborhoods, couldn’t it?)
May 9th, 2012 | 3:41 am
Alan Jacobs is right on the money (quoted in the comment above from Charles Collier). If she had walked back the implication that one can judge a field based on a perusal of dissertation titles, or had instead redirected her criticism to the puff-piece about these Ph.D. candidates, and if she had made reference to serious criticisms of Black Studies and the like (as she did, belatedly, in her WSJ piece on the dust-up), then she probably wouldn’t have been canned. As Jacob says, there wasn’t much to defend after she doubled down on not needing to read even snippets of the dissertations.
That said, this revelation that the Brainstorm blog has editorial standards for evidence and argument seems to be something new! At least a couple of the contributors are completely off the wall and seldom present anything like argument or evidence. (They also know not to touch the various third rails of academics.)
May 9th, 2012 | 7:29 am
Fake Herzog
To infer from some racial characteristic that an individual possesses and from the conduct of others that share that characteristic with him or her that that individual is more likely to commit some crime is the purest example of racial prejudice that it would be possible to conceive. In the same way, it would be pure prejudice on my part to suggest that, because the police force is recruited from the lumpen proletariat, its members are prone to racial prejudice.
May 9th, 2012 | 7:41 am
My father-in-law, a professor at an Ivy League School, used to refer to post-graduate “scholarship” (PhDs) as “Piled High and Deep”. When it comes to these addled academics, I’m beginning to have warm feelings about Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
May 9th, 2012 | 7:48 am
Charles Collier, quoting Alan Jacbos: “I think her post was way out of line — especially written for a periodical run by and for academics. If there’s one thing that all academics ought to be able to agree on, it’s that you don’t criticize stuff you haven’t read. You just don’t, not ever.”
A title is a rather important part of a dissertation. And academics judge books (and papers, articles) by their covers, particularly in their decision to NOT READ THEM, all the time. They do it in discussions among themselves, they do it in decisions about who to interview, etc., etc. No, they are not supposed to do it when writing reviews or giving tenure decisions, or in their own research. So I am agreed with Jacobs there. But do I apply this further, to a general principle that no-one in academia or connected to it ever criticize stuff they haven’t read? Please.
Riley is a reporter/researcher on the academic beat. An implicit part of her work is speaking truths about academia that those within cannot for fear of offending standards of collegiality. That also means speaking for and to her more conservative readers’ fear/suspicion that a lot of what is being produced in academia, research-wise is of poor quality, particularly when governed by the same cliques of left-leaning and conservative-excluding profs that regularly result in 95% or greater left-of-Republican-party faculties in humanities and social science departments, egregious cases of political indoctrination, etc. These titles supply that fear/suspicion with grounds.
Put the shoe on the other foot. A blog-post that criticized someone for a title that seemed racially insensitive, say, “Why Martin Luther King, Jr. was influenced by Communists,” but GASP without reading it, or GASP without personally knowing the author and whether she was racist, would be okay, right? Not ideal, but relevant, right? We would sympathize with a blog-author who said to herself, “I don’t have time to wade through this old King-is-a-commie conspiracy theory nonsense,” right?
Get some thicker skin, folks.
May 9th, 2012 | 7:55 am
Love Ms Hayes’ dissertation title: “So I Could Be Easeful . . . ” Pure smarmy Maya Angelou BS. She will surely be on Oprah soon, or whatever passes for Oprah nowadays.
May 9th, 2012 | 9:39 am
David Nickol But a tremendous amount of scholarly work gets published, and how much of it is a real contribution to the field? Probably not very much. And here we’re talking about dissertations. Probably only a few dissertations, even by people who were brilliant and became famous scholars, have been important or enduring works.
Whatever Forster’s criticism of pseudo-scholarly work in upper-class Britain may have been, a real dissertation is hardly “pseudo-scholarship”, even if they are not judged important or enduring over the long run. Everyone may be familiar with Newton’s Principia or Einstein’s work, but they would have been impossible without incremental contribution of hundreds, or even thousands, of people whose research (dissertations included) led to that point. Admittedly, my point of view may be rose-tinted by the nature of my field, where the standard remains “truth”, rather than political correctness, and I can think of several worthy Master’s theses that helped advance my field — never mind doctoral dissertations.
If I have seen farther than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants. — Isaac Newton
May 9th, 2012 | 9:51 am
John Fletcher: Perhaps the analogy you are after is: Schaefer Riley’s judgment reading dissertation titles is to juries delivering verdicts after reading the first sentences of case briefs. After all you are trying to make the point that experts-in-training talk to experts rather than laypersons (the non-ordained).
However I admit that I’ve never written a paper on “Analogies in defense of doctoral processes: a critical survey” so can hardly offer any intelligent comment on the issue at hand.
May 9th, 2012 | 10:14 am
With respect, Carl Eric Scott, this is not about thick or thin skin. It’s about conserving an institution. You want to kill academia? Turn it into a battle of perceptions and not substance. You cannot advance any sort of debate by substituting suspicion for actual intellectual engagement. That’s what Riley did with the dissertations, it’s wrong, Jacobs knows it, and he’s able to see past personal connections and probably ideological sympathy to criticize it.
But I hope a journalist will show up to defend the institution of journalism. Using unsubstantiated opinions to dismiss entire research fields and departments cannot possibly up to the standards of responsible editorializing.
May 9th, 2012 | 10:44 am
Even if I grant that perhaps Ms. Riley was off in criticizing the midwife dissertation example (as that seems like it might…just might…be a legitimate topic of scholarly work), the “Black Republican” example is just risible; Ms. Riley could have read that dissertation ten times and it wouldn’t have changed anything — you, me, and everyone with half a brain can ridicule a paper that describes John McWhorter as a “conservative” (this is a guy who publicly defends President Obama) and also describes these black Republicans as playing “one of the most-significant roles in the assault on the civil-rights legacy that benefited them.” No reading necessary.
May 9th, 2012 | 10:52 am
Look at what Riley is criticizing — both the subject of “natural birth literature” and presumably the idea that black women can have “authoritative knowledge” of the subject.
Bet you’d pop a button if a white woman claimed that black women had special knowledge of “natural birth”.
Or if someone suggested that white women had special knowledge of anything at all.
The difference between “black studies” and regular studies is that black studies is “blacks are special” studies – where certain attitudes are simply expected and others are simply not allowed. If you want to write something real about race and childbirth – and be taken seriously – you should do so over there with the serious historians, who are expected to follow a set of rules that don’t weight for the victimhood or “distress” or feelings of the author, but instead have something to actually offer in terms of old fashioned academic standards (which includes, by the way, being subject to criticism – another major difference between “black studies” vs. real disciplines, apparently).
May 9th, 2012 | 10:53 am
Black Studies is an interdisciplinary field.
It would appear to be more of a nondisciplinary field.
May 9th, 2012 | 10:59 am
Are the projects in question here under-researched? Badly argued? Disconnected to related scholarship? Passed by virtue of political correctness rather than by metrics of scholarly quality?
Ms. Riley certainly provides no reason to think so.
That’s because her argument was that the topics themselves indicate a problem.
And they do. You can look only at the snippets of information presented here and see that there is a problem – one that exists whether or not the arguments are badly argued or under-researched.
The entire premise that Thomas Sowell owes something to “the civil rights movement” (specifically, owes it to them to “not attack” them) because “the civil rights movement” in the past has helped him – this is a flawed argument whether or not it is well argued. A person capable of graduate-level critical thinking should not be writing topics based on such obviously flawed logic.
May 9th, 2012 | 11:37 am
The Naomi Schaefer Riley brouhaha reminds me a bit of an episode of I Love Lucy in which Ricky and the Mertz’s bet Lucy she can’t go 24 hours without telling a lie. Lucy has quite a time of it at first, but as the show progresses, she begins to enjoy speaking her mind, becomes brutally (and hilariously) frank, and clearly delights in insults all her friends by saying every critical thing that pops into her mind in the most blunt fashion.
May 9th, 2012 | 11:48 am
Are you a real flesh and blood human being?
Fake Herzog,
Yes. I even have a real name so that if I insult people, which I try not to do, they know who is doing it.
May 9th, 2012 | 12:32 pm
David,
You have obviously never read anything that Riley wrote prior to the recent ‘racist’ kerfuffle orchestrated by the activists in the nation’s black studies departments…. Riley has always been an outspoken critic of the academy, whether it’s gender studies or whatever the latest craze in academia. Her writings go back years . . . So swallow a bit of your own medicine and refrain from commenting on an issue of which you have no real knowledge.
May 9th, 2012 | 2:27 pm
So swallow a bit of your own medicine and refrain from commenting on an issue of which you have no real knowledge.
publius,
If you can’t follow the advice you gave everyone else to ignore me—“Perhaps his self-appointed role as the designated dissenter would be best dealt with by not rising to his bait, and letting him dwell in the divine misery of benign neglect.”—why should I accept your suggestion to stop posting on this or any other topic? As you know, “Comments are moderated, and those that do not advance the engagement of the topic will be deleted.” Let the moderators decide what is posted and what is not.
May 9th, 2012 | 2:40 pm
Charles, also with respect, you say: “You want to kill academia? Turn it into a battle of perceptions and not substance. You cannot advance any sort of debate by substituting suspicion for actual intellectual engagement. That’s what Riley did with the dissertations, it’s wrong…”
In the broad sense I am in agreement with this, and acknowledge the temptation that you are pushing against. So, a good word.
But applied well to this case? No.
Again, try out a reverse situation. Let us say there is a Graduate Program in “Conservative Studies” on a campus. A liberal writer on the academic beat comes across the titles of the dissertations produced by its graduates. They are unimpressive titles suggestive of shallow thinking and ideological agenda: let us say one is “The Employment of Nazi Rhetoric in the Speeches of Saddam Hussein,” and another is “Glen Beck and Thomas Paine: A Dialogue across the Centuries.” She is about to submit a zingy blog post on the matter, related to her larger theory (developed at length elsewhere) on the inadvisability of schools having Conservative Studies programs, when suddenly her Collier-and-Jacobs-schooled blog editor steps in and says, “You can’t do that. Not unless you’ve read those dissertations.”
Our good liberal author says: “Uh…how much of the dissertations?”
Collier-and-Jacobs-schooled-editor: “How can you ask such a question?! You don’t criticize stuff you haven’t read. You just don’t, not ever. You either have read them or you have not, and unless you have, you may not criticize them.”
************************************
And Charles, I’d go further. Consider the wrong that Jacobs is doing here. Riley is being accused of being racist. She has been fired, and on the basis of a web-mobbing. And now, each and every person who acted mob-like towards her in that comments section, that pulled out the R-word, that called for her firing, can say, “Well, even conservative-friendly academics like Alan Jacobs know that this just isn’t done, that it was way out of line, yada, yada…” From now on, she gets to be tagged with the “controversial-author” or the “accused-of-racism-author” tag in every moderate-masquerading misrepresentation of her work penned by a liberal enemy.
It’s a mau-mau-ing. It’s libelous in spirit. Clearly if she were a professor, the result could have been firing, re-assignment, etc.
And Alan Jacobs so much as says, “Well, you made one little mistake, Mrs. Riley, so that’s that. Regrettable that the mob-like-academics get to win this one, but what’s wrong is Wrong, that is, WRONG!!!, and you won’t ever catch me saying otherwise.”
Can we not criticize what Riley did without doing it in a way that supports the hysterical, agenda-driven, and very-bad-precedent-setting denunciation she’s getting?
Jacobs can’t.
May 9th, 2012 | 4:34 pm
Carl (first names are good, though only my grandmother calls me Charles), consider me unconvinced. The kerfuffle that followed Riley’s post is utterly unsurprising: she derailed the entire conversation by failing to engage in reasonable criticism. That’s the problem with turning academic differences into a debate over appearances—it turns the whole thing into a game of shadow boxing that nobody can win. Who can be shocked that authors (or readers sympathetic to authors) who had been subjected to superficial and unfair criticism returned the favor and wondered about what was *really* motivating Riley? Riley huffs and puffs and cries “liberal victimization claptrap!”; respondents return the huffing and puffing and cry “racism!” Are you surprised that an unfair, un-argued, and un-informed hit piece generated more heat than light?
And Jacobs does not say, “You made one little mistake and that’s that.” That’s quite an unfair reading of Jacobs’ comment, and your own concern for justice to interlocutors boomerangs on you here. Jacobs actually says that the one little mistake wouldn’t have led to the firing had Riley owned the mistake. “I don’t know what went on behind the scenes at the Chronicle, but I suspect that Naomi would still have that gig if she had copped to the legitimate criticisms. Instead, in her follow-up she doubled down on her original post. That was disappointing, and made it really hard for anyone who wants to uphold basic intellectual standards in academia to support her.”
And she continues to deny having made “little mistakes.” She’s in the WSJ playing her own victimization game (read only the WSJ piece, and you wouldn’t know that serious academics, even conservatives, have offered substantive criticism of her post): http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304363104577391842133259230.html
If Riley or anyone else wants to defeat the “visigoths in tweed” (to use D’Souza’s old putdown of the guardians of an allegedly “illiberal education”), they would do best to actually beat them and not join them. You do that the old fashioned way—by having actual arguments that work. And by owning mistakes when you make them. And, not least, by reading texts before you dismiss them and entire research programs associated with them.
May 9th, 2012 | 4:59 pm
Charlie,
So under your standard, no blogger should be allowed to comment, pro or con, on Obamacare without having read the 1000+ page health care legislation. Short of that, it’s nothing but a hit piece…..
May 9th, 2012 | 5:33 pm
The authors of the doctoral dissertations criticized by Riley had this to say in a piece written for the Chronicle of Higher Education:
“One can only assume that in a bid to not be “out-niggered” by her right-wing cohort, Riley found some black women graduate students to beat up on. Despite her attempts to silence us personally, and indeed the discipline as a whole, her exhortations confirm the need for the vigorous study and investigation of black life in the United States and beyond.”
If Riley is guilty of a “hit piece” where does this piece fall in the pecking order of offensiveness…. and just how did Riley “silence” these students? And is it likely that a white woman married to an African-American journalist was trying to avoid being, as the dissertation authors put it, “out-niggered”? Talk about unsubstantiated opinions…..
May 9th, 2012 | 6:38 pm
Publius, I prefer to engage people willing to put their name next to their words. And I’m not interested in chasing deflections.
May 10th, 2012 | 6:48 am
Publius, I prefer to engage people willing to put their name next to their words. And I’m not interested in chasing deflections.
In other words, he doesn’t have an answer for you, Publius.
May 10th, 2012 | 6:51 am
With respect, Carl Eric Scott, this is not about thick or thin skin. It’s about conserving an institution. You want to kill academia? Turn it into a battle of perceptions and not substance.
You’ve got it backwards.
It is failure to criticize when criticism is needed that has caused such damage to academia.
The topics chosen for these dissertations look like schlock. It does nobody any good to protect anyone from that fact. The argument that apparently most dissertations being put out these days are equally stupid does not help the case.
May 10th, 2012 | 10:43 am
Charlie,
Thank you for your response. I stand corrected.
May 10th, 2012 | 10:45 am
Apologies, everyone, for having initiated an ITALICS OVERLOAD. Hopefully this will correct it.
Well, Charles, good discussion. But unless you accept that, in terms of moral seriousness, what was a misstep by Riley is in a totally different class than the 1) web-mobbing of her, and 2) firing of her, I stand in fundamental disagreement with you.
Additionally, what I think you remain blind to is that this is in the context of these facts: a) conservatives are an endangered and oft-persecuted species in academia, b) academia is in big trouble, c) its leaders needs desperately to begin taking the criticisms of center-right analysts like Riley seriously, d) far too many key hiring/firing/program-funding decisions are now made by more-or-less polite forms of PC mobbings by oh-so-respectably-credentialed and collegiality-demanding academics, and e) there is established pattern of such academics getting Utterly Shocked when–for many of them it seems only the third time in their life–they hear a genuinely conservative argument about their domains from someone within or familiar with academia.
Jacobs surely knows this; he knows that academia needs the likes of Riley, and more importantly, that its leaders must UTTERLY SHAME these mob-like actions, lest the grow more common. THAT should be the main story here. And yet, he sells Riley down the river with un-nuanced statements that lead to cheap moral equivalence at best, and to the vindication of the web-mob at worst.
May 10th, 2012 | 11:44 am
Alan Jacobs has criticized Naomi Schaefer Riley, it’s true. I wouldn’t, however, describe his statements as un-nuanced (and it’s certainly possible to criticize a writer without thinking that all of the attacks launched on her have merit).
There are really several questions in play here, which Jacobs has identified; he’s only addressed one of those questions. And he’s not exactly thrilled with the powers that be at the Chronicle, either.
May 10th, 2012 | 12:51 pm
Carl,
I think it must be admitted we’re in fundamental disagreement. You’re asking for sympathy for Riley’s bad behavior just because she represents a minority intellectual position. I have great respect for dissenting conservative intellectuals, even when I don’t agree with them. But the sort of cheap conservatism that feeds the culture-warring, wagon-circling, balkanizing of American discourse and politics, that conservatism I don’t care for at all, and I don’t think it deserves protection or affirmative action or anything of the sort when it comes to the academy. (For the knee-jerking lurkers, I don’t care for the liberal version either, but that’s not what is being debated here.)
When the NY Times let Kristol go after a year, I thought they were entirely justified—his editorials were absolute junk, frankly of the same poor and needlessly incendiary caliber as Riley’s offending post (if not her more considered work, which I haven’t read and I am not commenting upon here). If the Times had done that to Ross Douthat, I think they’d deserve serious criticism. That’s the difference—Douthat, as much as I disagree with him much of the time—makes real arguments, appeals to evidence, writes respectfully even when polemically, etc. Riley did no such thing, refused to admit her error, and is now parading around as a victim of mob rule (and you’re giving credence to that notion in your own remarks).
It’s not mob rule, it’s called “being responsive to your paying customers and remembering that the mission of the publication is not dialogue for dialogue’s sake but for the upbuilding of the academy.” Riley is and was not entitled to employment by the CHE. She was not fired capriciously or without cause. She messed up, refused to own it, doubled-down, and was shown the door. She’s now parlayed her “victim” status into a WSJ editorial and good publicity for what appears to be her next book. And since Riley is evidently committed to playing to the right-wing hyperventilating crowd, she would seem to have benefited from being “victimized,” not suffered from it.
I think the CHE deserves all sorts of criticism. The initial response of the editor was so poor that *her* employment should receive serious review, in my estimation. She blew it, though she did come back and apologize for blowing it. Still, such a reversal gives the CHE a black eye and the buck stops with the editor.
What the academy needs is a commitment by all parties to discerning the truth, wherever it lies. Riley’s post was light years away from such a commitment. If she wants to make a contribution to the academy, she has to say something interesting—not ask us to give her a free pass because she’s not a liberal.
May 10th, 2012 | 1:33 pm
Charlie,
Is accusing someone of “playing to the right-wing hyperventilating crowd” perchance an example of a kind of dialogue that feeds the “culture-warring, wagon-circling, balkanizing of American discourse.” Just asking….
May 11th, 2012 | 7:53 pm
By “truth” I assume you mean “ideology”.
Or do you agree that since the “civil rights movement” helped Thomas Sowell (let’s be generous and assume that point was actually proved), does it therefore follow that he deserves criticism for having “the wrong” political views, or is he now permanently in the debt of that civil rights movement, and should that be his primary yardstick in what he believes and what he says (whether or not it helps or hurts the “movement” that he apparently owes his success to)?
The racism here is not Riley’s.
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