Quote:Conservatives defend fired writer on race
Value of black studies at issue

By Ben Wolfgang
The Washington Times
Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Conservative commentators and think tanks have rushed in recent days to the defense of embattled journalist Naomi Schaefer Riley, who was fired from her job as a blogger with the widely respected [] Chronicle of Higher Education for questioning the value of black-studies programs.

Chester E. Finn, president of the conservative education think tank the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, called the decision “a truly reprehensible episode in the annals of American journalism.”

Liberal-turned-conservative Harry Stein, contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal magazine, said it represents “one more nail in the coffin of American higher education.”

Commentary Magazine writer Jonathan Tobin argued that Ms. Riley “transgressed no rules of journalism other than the need not to offend powerful constituencies.”

The heated debate, which has escalated quickly in the days since Ms. Riley’s April 30 piece was published, has again shined a spotlight on the sticky issue of race relations in America, particularly in academia.

In her post to the magazine’s Brainstorm blog, commenting on a lengthy Chronicle news feature on black studies, Ms. Riley said several of the black-studies dissertations cited in the piece were “a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap.”

She also argued that their topics — which included supposed racism in the subprime mortgage market and an examination of “historical black midwifery” — miss the mark by failing to address the real problems facing the black community.

“There are legitimate debates about the problems that plague the black community from high incarceration rates to low graduation rates to high out-of-wedlock birth rates,” she wrote. “But it’s clear that they’re not happening in black-studies departments.”

Shortly afterward, the Chronicle asked her to write a second article defending herself from a swelling tide of criticism including a petition demanding her firing. It attracted more than 6,000 signatures before the Chronicle responded by dismissing her on Monday.

Editor Liz McMillen said that the writing didn’t meet the publication’s “standards for reporting and fairness,” and she also apologized to readers who may have felt “betrayed.”

Ms. Riley also endured rampant accusations of racism across the internet, with some branding her as a peddler of hate speech.

But her termination has generated its own backlash from those who believe an honest discussion about American race relations has again been pushed aside to ensure no one is offended.

“There was little reasoned argument, almost no attempt at factual refutation from these supposed defenders of free thought and lively exchange of ideas, but mainly name calling,” Mr. Stein said. “As always, the ultimate conversation stopper — ‘racist’ — was at the top of the list.”

Others have noted that the Chronicle, founded in 1966 and viewed as a leading authority on higher-education issues, should have handled Ms. Riley’s piece and the reaction to it much differently. Writing in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, Ms. Riley pointed out that her former employer at first “stood its ground,” keeping her on staff for a week after the piece was published.

But that position didn’t last long. In her statement, Ms. McMillen flatly, and uncharacteristically, admitted that the uproar played a role in Ms. Riley’s firing, telling angry readers “we’ve heard you.”

“For an influential and widely read publication that’s been around since I was a graduate student myself and that boasts of its vibrant discussion forums, [Ms. Riley’s firing was] wrong,” Mr. Finn said. “Vibrancy, it seems, has been replaced by political correctness and intimidation.”

Quote:The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations.

April 30, 2012, 10:24 pm
By Naomi Schaefer Riley

NB: To see Chronicle editors’ final response to the below post, please read “A Note to Readers.”

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.

Then there is Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of “Race for Profit: Black Housing and the Urban Crisis of the 1970s.” Ms. Taylor believes there was apparently some kind of conspiracy in the federal government’s promotion of single family homes in black neighborhoods after the unrest of the 1960s. Single family homes! The audacity! But Ms. Taylor sees that her issue is still relevant today. (Not much of a surprise since the entirety of black studies today seems to rest on the premise that nothing much has changed in this country in the past half century when it comes to race. Shhhh. Don’t tell them about the black president!) She explains that “The subprime lending crisis, if it did nothing else, highlighted the profitability of racism in the housing market.” The subprime lending crisis was about the profitability of racism? Those millions of white people who went into foreclosure were just collateral damage, I guess.

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? Because they believe there are some fundamental problems in black culture that cannot be blamed on white people they are assaulting civil rights?

Seriously, folks, there are legitimate debates about the problems that plague the black community from high incarceration rates to low graduation rates to high out-of-wedlock birth rates. But it’s clear that they’re not happening in black-studies departments. If these young scholars are the future of the discipline, I think they can just as well leave their calendars at 1963 and let some legitimate scholars find solutions to the problems of blacks in America. Solutions that don’t begin and end with blame the white man.

Quote:May 13, 2012
Naomi Schaefer Riley and the Corruption of the Academy
By Abraham H. Miller

Even though The Chronicle of Higher Education long ago reflected the leftist agenda of its readership, I never could have imagined it would stoop so low as to fire someone for writing a piece at variance with the political correctness it has come to uphold. But it did. The Chronicle fired Naomi Schaefer Riley for revealing what almost everyone on any campus knows, but is reluctant to say, about black studies: it is a political cause masquerading as an academic discipline, and if there were real intellectual, and not political, standards on campus, it would be shut down.

There is, however, a larger issue: not only is what Schaefer Riley says true about why black studies should be closed down, but her statements could also be easily extended to many fields in the social sciences and humanities. The vulnerability of the campus on this issue is why the Chronicle chose the unseemly and totally inappropriate device of censorship. It was so willing to placate its audience of ideological leftists massing with pitchforks in hand that it inadvertently gave Riley's exposé on black studies far and away more visibility than it would otherwise have achieved.

For a higher education periodical to substitute censorship for debate speaks volumes about the deterioration of the entire educational edifice. In order for this failing institution to persist, its reality must be hidden from the larger public. Large segments of higher education are not education at all, but an expensive immersion in leftist propaganda for the attainment of a degree that is as worthless as all the multicultural requirements coerced on a captive and overly passive audience of students.

A large part of academia is a bubble, and like early warnings about the housing crisis, few in academia want to acknowledge that the bubble is about to burst. In academia, as in the world of investment banking, no one wants to kill the golden goose. Too many have such strong and vested interests in the system as it exists that they have no motivation to consider the long-term consequences.

There is the already bloated academic bureaucracy that keeps growing. Where else can a degree in an intellectually demanding field like education administration command a mid-six-figure salary? There is the student loan industry that charges variable-rate interest and has created spiraling debt that an increasing number of former students cannot pay. There is the local construction industry that is turning universities into country clubs. There is the faculty that has transformed departments into a propaganda mills for left-wing causes. There is the diversity industry that has used universities to create make-believe jobs for black professionals, who thrive on allegations of victimization. And, of course, there are the students and their parents, who want easy degrees and only later become disappointed when those degrees are found to be not gateways to economic success but debt-laden albatrosses.

At the same time, minority legislators want to know how well universities are doing for their constituents. In many states, state legislators have courtesy adjunct appointments on university faculties and are present to intrude personally in the university's business, especially when it comes to a school's responsiveness to minority students.

For public universities, not only is it necessary to all but go to the shopping malls to recruit minority students, but it is also vital to make sure that the institution is committed to their retention and their advancement through the system. This serves to keep the caucus of minority legislators -- the minions of perpetual outrage and the bloodhounds of discrimination -- at bay. Social promotion, consequently, is no longer restricted to high school. It is vital in minimizing the intrusiveness of legislators. As one legislator told me, "I watch to see how many blacks get degrees." Indeed, we knew he watched, and we certainly knew how to produce blacks with degrees, which sometimes was something altogether different from education.

Even with grade inflation, institutionalized minority sympathy grading, and departments that are little more than left-wing propaganda mills, some minority students fall through the cracks. Many of them are totally unprepared for college. They were recruited to keep up the numbers for the government record-keepers and to assuage the minority caucuses in the legislature. These students need a safety net. And this is one of the functions of the various studies programs like black studies.

When athletes do poorly in their classes, they become ineligible. The athletic program then enrolls them in a summer course that might be called "the theory of the forward pass." This is obviously not a course in the physics of trajectories, but is one that generates four easy hours of "A" to balance out bad grades and maintain eligibility. Studies programs serve similar purposes. Courses in "black hair," "gangsta rap," and "the politics of white oppression" can pump up the most dismal of averages and retain students.

So why all the outrage over Schaefer Riley articulating what has long been in the public domain for anyone who cared to read it? Schafer Riley's "crime" is that she made it too visible. A half-century ago, the South Korean government invested in the creation of a resort complex called Walker Hill and publicly advertised all its licentious activities to lure the patronage of American soldiers. The U.S. military immediately declared Walker Hill off-limits. The South Koreans were both incredulous and outraged. When they confronted the American military, saying that the soldiers went to Tokyo to indulge in all the same vices and yet the military never declared Tokyo off-limits, the military simply responded that Tokyo did not advertises its vices on large billboards. The South Koreans took down the billboards, and the military's restrictions were lifted.

Schaefer Riley was unwilling to join The Chronicle of Higher Education in playing cover-up or in going along with its fatuous pieces on black studies that ultimately led to her biting and controversial response. Academia cannot tolerate the antiseptic of truth. And as students know, it is about not just black studies, but a large number of required courses that teach nothing useful, but intead serve the vision of those who think academic freedom gives them a license to use the classroom to indoctrinate social and political values.

I had an advisee, an older student and veteran, whose schedule put him in an English lit section where the professor was obsessed with animal rights. All the readings were about the abuse of animals. In addition, the students were coerced to work at a local animal shelter, tending to animals and cleaning cages in order to get their credits for English lit. Imagine paying hundreds of dollars a credit-hour for the sublime experience of cleaning up animal dung.

I know of departments where dissertations never mentioned "Israel," but instead referred to it as the "Zionist entity," and this was considered scholarship. I know of dissertations written totally from Marxist and Soviet Union sources. I know of faculty who wrote dissertations for minority students. I know of Middle East departments where faux history required students accept that the current-day Palestinians are the descendants of the Philistines. I know of a psychology department where any departure from the "fact" that Beethoven was black will be tolerated to the sound of one's grade falling through the floorboards. I know of faculty who passed people on preliminary examinations by simply asking leading questions and doing so without a tinge of embarrassment or conscience.

Black studies might be different in degree, perhaps, but not in kind. The same corruption, the same useless propaganda masquerading as scholarship, the same turgid scholarship sanctified with the frequent but often inappropriate use of statistics, and the same social promotions all exist throughout the liberal arts colleges. The system is corrupt. The students are learning how to mouth the political banalities of their professors and little more. That is why they are unemployable in positions that require college educations. That is why they cannot pay off their student loans. That is why we continue to recruit professionals from overseas.

Naomi Schafer Riley exposed not just black studies; indirectly, she exposed the bubble that is academia. Academia in the liberal arts and sciences has become a therapeutic society for angry leftists able to act out in class under the guise of academic freedom, and higher education has deteriorated into a propaganda mill for those seeking their own brand of social justice. Although nearly everyone knows what academia has become, just as everyone knew about Walker Hill, there is a large vested interest in not having it splattered on billboards for the world to see. Naomi Schafer Riley had the courage to run afoul of those interests. The academic world needs more truth-telling.

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Quote:Not much of a surprise since the entirety of black studies today seems to rest on the premise that nothing much has changed in this country in the past half century when it comes to race. Shhhh. Don’t tell them about the black president!

Quote:I know of departments where dissertations never mentioned "Israel," but instead referred to it as the "Zionist entity," and this was considered scholarship.

Quote:I know of Middle East departments where faux history required students accept that the current-day Palestinians are the descendants of the Philistines.

Quote: I know of Middle East departments where faux history required students accept that the current-day Palestinians are the descendants of the Philistines.

(05-15-2012, 06:40 AM)Ben Johnson Wrote:

Quote: I know of Middle East departments where faux history required students accept that the current-day Palestinians are the descendants of the Philistines.

It doesn't get any stupider than that.

The name Palestine is likely from the name Philistine but there was over 1,000 year gap from the last Philistine to the first Arab.

There is a large school of thought, myself included, that places the development of a Palestinian people to post 1967. Prior to 1918 there was a large population of Arabs from the Arabian Peninsula to Suez to the Mediterranean to Turkey to Persia who considered themselves one people. National labels were meaningless. Probably still are.