BLOG COMMENT OF THE DAY:

I’m not sure if the author is so sheltered as to think that Melissa Click only represents “everything CONSERVATIVE lawmakers and pundits hate about academe [sic]” (emphasis added) or whether that is her cynical, intellectually lazy way of trying to generate sympathy from politically like-minded readers by sending up the “enemy of the right” bat signal in the opening sentence of this piece.

If anything, it was the sane left that found Click the most reprehensible in my experience. Even the social-justice oriented left who ostensibly supports the cause that Click claims to champion were off-put by the PR damage that her behavior does to them.

But hey, if Robin Wilson wants to behave as though the only people in America who are repulsed by the idea of a career academic making a salary writing about Martha Stewart and Twilight conventions trying to bully a campus reporter due to some delusional notions of social justice ends justifying means are conservatives, who am I to get in her way? I see that as a compliment.

“Neontaster,” responding today to “Being Melissa Click” at the Chronicle of Higher Education, written by Robin Wilson. Wilson writes that “Pursuing a Ph.D. in communication at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Ms. Click studied Martha Stewart Living…Her research on Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey also departed from the norm. Whereas most of her colleagues’ scholarship has a quantitative focus, Ms. Click does qualitative analyses — including extended personal interviews with fans of popular work.”