How the Academic Establishment has Silenced a Major Critic of the Field of “Black Studies”
In other words, an expression of opinion — that cited chapter and verse to back up her argument — led the editors of the Chronicle to fire Riley from her post as one of a group of distinguished bloggers on academic issues.
Earlier, McMillen had asked readers to submit their views about Riley’s position. It was, she then had said, “informed opinion.” Now, having been trounced upon by the mob of politically correct leftists and the civil rights establishment, McMillen has backed down, apologized to the mob, and unceremoniously fired Riley. She has, in effect, allowed the organized mob of leftist academics to dictate to The Chronicle of Higher Education’s editors what is to be allowed on its pages, and what is to be forbidden.
If anything, her action validates Riley’s own observation that the academy, and black studies in particular, is filled with “left-wing victimization claptrap.” Those thin-skinned academics can’t stand being called out by a shrewd observer who has managed to zero in on their own failures and to expose them to readers of the newspaper. So rather than fear more of the same from Riley, they did what they always do: demand the suppression of opinion they do not agree with. On their terms the only side that deserves to see print is the one they take, which is to them the given truth.
Evidently the editors of a once distinguished publication cannot stand up to the charge of racism coming from the civil rights establishment, and hence, they backed down and gave in without a moment’s thought.
One would think that the editors would realize that rather than bring them praise for wise judgment, their actions would embarrass them and make people no longer take anything they say seriously. But this is par for the course. In the academy these days, the only acceptable opinion is that of the political Left.
Naomi Schaefer Riley dared to tell the truth. For that sin she has been silenced. I only wish I still subscribed to the publication so I could cancel in protest. If you are among those who still do, please consider taking such action. Money talks, and the only protest the editors will notice is the kind that loses them readers. They don’t take ideas or freedom of expression seriously. We have learned that already. At least consider writing them a letter of your own expressing your feelings about how a journal that supposedly represents institutions of higher learning has failed the basic test of academic freedom — allowing different ideas to be expressed and for those considering them to reach their own decisions.
We have learned one good lesson from the firing of Riley. It is that we no longer have any reason to take anything the editors of The Chronicle of Higher Education say seriously.
Update:
In today’s Wall Street Journal, Riley herself discusses the issues in her dismissal. You can read it here. Riley wrote the following:
If you want to know why almost all of the responses to my original post consist of personal attacks on me, along with irrelevant mentions of Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and George Zimmerman, it is because black studies is a cause, not a course of study. By doubting the academic worthiness of black studies, my critics conclude, I am opposed to racial justice—and therefore a racist.
She has written herself the best account of the issues, and the best defense of her own blog posts at The Chronicle. Any other publication would be wise to immediately hire Riley so readers can continue to read her accounts of the follies of academia.
The tentacles of liberal-sponsored black nationalism have been remarkably effective in silencing the opposition. See http://clarespark.com/2009/10/31/the-offing-of-martin-luther-king-jr-and-ralph-bunche/, also excerpts from Ivy League conferences here: http://clarespark.com/2010/07/18/white-elite-enabling-of-black-power/. My whole website is a refutation of the multiculturalist bogus claims.
Thanks Claire. I always enjoy your thoughts.
Now if we could storm the Universities and replace the current Established Power Structure.
I gave this talk to a symposium on the legacy of Ralph Bunche at UCLA in 2004. The keynote speaker, Charles Henry, of UC Berkeley, wouldn’t even speak to me during the two day symposium. Here is the link: http://clarespark.com/2009/10/10/ralph-bunche-and-the-jewish-problem/. Nor did the official record of the gathering (poorly attended, but lavishly catered), reflect the content of my paper, that strongly criticized black studies as a separatist institution. These were the spawn of Malcolm X, a leader strongly rejected by Bunche.
And Rich Lowry’s firing of John Derbyshire and Robert Weissberg was … what exactly… if not in the great tradition of editors cowed by noisy black activists?
The Civil Rights effort was a welcome tonic to the sluggish reforms America had made in enforcing equal rights in its race relations. We now have the Snivel Riots movement which is interested in exploiting and increasing unequal treatment in their favor at the expense of other Americans, and it will scream and yell all it can to get it.
And until we restore what is written over the architrave of the Supreme Court “EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW” this obscenity will continue to destroy civil discourse and public behavior.
Your first assertion is incorrect. Derbyshire and Weissberg were actually racists. Their writings sought to blame problems on people due to their skin color, and completely ignored personal responsibility concepts.
Your second assertion is also incorrect. The so-called Civil Rights Movement did NOTHING to help race relations or people who suffered racism inflicted by others. You should read Thomas Sowell’s book, “Economic Facts and Fallacies”. It destroys your claim. The data shows that blacks had enjoyed a steady gain in salary and freedom long before the movement, and that the Civil Rights Movement actually seemed to have caused salaries for blacks to flat line for a few years.
Your final assertion is axiomatic, so you get 1 out of 3, so…
I stopped reading it years ago, and I’m in academia.
I wonder how man others in your proffesion think the same way but won;t openly admit it?
Just as the unintended consequence of affirmative action is to make some people skeptical of a perfectly well-qualified black employee, the lazy ‘blame whitey’ approach to research ruins the chances for genuinely well-researched analysis of black culture and history.
Sorry, run-on sentence.
Clearly another example of the ongoing war on women. I blame Mitt Romney.
Womens studies is another useless area of acedemia.
How else can a bitter, man-hating, lesbian get a four-year degree without actually having to interact with a male who possesses any level of testosterone? And when she finishes her degree in Women’s Studies, she will be uniquely qualified…to teach Women’s Studies.
And when she finishes her degree in Women’s Studies, she will be uniquely qualified . . . to teach Women’s Studies.
You just nailed the whole purpose of the phony-baloney enterprise. It’s like manufacturing a part that can only be used in the one machine that makes the part. Call it self-perpetuation. In this case, the purpose is to provide lifetime employment to the otherwise unemployable.
In the military, programs like that are called “self-licking ice cream cones”.
I’ll prove it. When formet Black Panther Julian Lester converted to Judaism (Conservative), he was forced to leave the Black Studies department. (The Jewish studies department took him in.)
What’s really transaprent is “feminist” studies. Last I heard, feminism is a political position. Even worse are “men’s studies” and “white studies”, whose very titles are (anti-male) sexism and (anti-white) racism. (Yes, I have a “men’s studies” textbook in my apartment, and I at least started the introduction. You can’t parody this stuff.)
When faced with opposition “The Chronicle of Higher Education” displayed the same sturdy backbone as the rest of academia.
So far the Left’s attempts to distort the rule of law to silence Fox News have failed, but not for lack of trying. Yet more symptoms of the same corrupt totalitarian religion.
Agree or be silent or be silenced.
Needs a copy reader. This passage:
is repeated.
Mr. Radosh can now explain how what the Chronicle did to Ms Riley differs in ANY ESSENTIAL from what National Review did to John Derbyshire, whose own “expression of opinion — that cited chapter and verse to back up his argument, led the editors of the National Review to fire Derbyshire from his post”.
I won’t hold my breath.
I don’t think Mr. Derbyshire should have been fired either.
“Money talks.” Yes, it does. But canceling a subscription on account of one action, is the equivalent of buying people’s choices — like literally buying the presidency.
If one disapproves of the Chronicle’s decision, one can explain one’s reasons. Personally, I may tend to agree with Naomi Shaefer Riley, but perhaps not with some vocabulary choices she made in her opinion.
Does this mean that with tactical vocabulary, that there will be a different conclusion? Or will it just confuse the reader as to the authors true meaning?
Any university department of “(anything) Studies” should be shut down.
No, because Jewish Studies, for example, is actually a field started in 19th century Germany. What should be done is denial of any government support, including loads for any couses in such fields, or to anyone with a major in such a field.
Unfortunately, the result will simply be to further ruin existing fields such as sociology. The conservative professors will be fired, and replaced by the “Studies” professors.
loans
You have accurately pointed out that the liberal Left despises reality – they want nothing to do with it. Riley herself has accurately depicted the vast majority of black articles on race, which is almost every article anyway, as blaming whites – it’s a default mode that can only be defined as an unhealthy obsession. Riley correctly depicts these articles as in fact almost invariably ending with the moral: white people are bad, and black people are good.
Reading The Root, owned by the Washington Post and run by Henry (beer summit) Gates, Jr., is every bit as foul as Stormfront, if somewhat more rhetorical and clever is disguising their disdain of white people with false journalism and academia.
The Root’s Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., is typical of The Root’s cadre of rhetorically challenged racists. He begins his take down of Riley thus:
“Ignorance can be so loud and in your face. That much we know; it is a common feature of American public debate these days. Just turn on Fox News or listen to talk radio.”
Political science in action there. After his article, it says this:
“Eddie S. Glaude Jr. is the William S. Tod Professor of Religion and African American Studies in the Department of Religion of Princeton University, and the chair of the school’s Center for African American Studies.”
So you have racism not only with car and hotel chain ads run by a good friend of the President of the United States, but institutionalized at Princeton.
Kirsten West Savali at Clutch begins her own takedown like this:
“Every now and again, there is a manifestation of white privilege so brilliant in its ignorance, so delusional, that it actually makes me want to go back to my days of being a mental health professional and offer my services.”
She backs it up by saying such things as “Ms. Riley seems to believe that Black Republicans, such as Clarence Thomas – who have made a living being step-n-fetchit tokens — are being unfairly maligned by liberals who would rather cry racism than actually solve problems in Black America”
And:
“It is not surprising that Ms. Riley is so oblivious to “the white man’s” role in the prison industrial complex…has played an integral role in the devastation that has plowed through Black America.”
I don’t want to quote more but they are almost unbelievable expressions of cheap psychology without a shred of evidence aside from decontextualized stats that prove the New York Yankees are part of a conspiracy merely by finishing in first place. The view of history expressed is one where these writers claim context has been compromised and history revised but such writers routinely indulge in decontextualized expressions such as Columbus being the first European slave trader in the Americas, as if he didn’t have massive company in the Aztecs and Africans in front and behind him. Since Columbus was looking for a way to get around Istanbul and not to enslave people on a continent he didn’t even know existed, I think it’s fair to say it wasn’t a raiding party.
Hey! Stormfront is the perfectly sound first novel in Jim Butcher’s The Dresden Files series of Science Fantasy novels. OK, it might actually be broken up as two words, but it’s hard to tell if it is on my copy or if that’s the effect of limited space on the layout.
One of the biggest favors ever done for me by a college professor was insisting that we read Vonnegut’s brilliant piece on political correctness, “Harrison Bergeron”. Oh, by the way, Vonnegut wrote it in 1968. Shocking how prophetic it was. http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html
Wow.
My BA is in history, and included two upper-division courses in “Afro-American” history taken circa ’69/70. Those courses contained absolutely nothing even vaguely resembling what Ms. Riley describes.
Either I was cheated, or I got a rational education.
That was pre-New Jim Crow, New Confederacy, white privilege, Critical Race Theory, Racism 2.0.
Here’s an AP story today about N. Carolina.
“The school said Tuesday football players represented 246 of 686 enrollments (36 percent) in the 54 courses within the Department of African and Afro-American Studies between summer 2007 and summer 2011. Those classes lacked appropriate supervision and were called ”aberrant” or were ”taught irregularly” with limited contact between instructors and students, according to a university report released Friday.”
It’s not 1969. Just being black makes you eligible for credit in blackness history or whatever.
‘…the editors told readers that they received “thousands” of protests. That means, of course, that Riley hit a real sore spot.’
Of course it means no such thing. It means that Riley’s written rubbish that needed to be confronted and refuted.
Which no one has done specifically other than saying she’s naughty and bad and wrong and stupid. That’ll get you credit at the right type of school as an essay.
Conversely, I could write an entire book just on the racism of any one black website. Just pick one, it doesn’t matter.
Hell, Fail, that kind of writing will get you a A on your essay at most any school these days. Just look at Patriot493 there; I bet he’s got one of the “Good Trying” degrees in Angry People Studies. He’s stupid enough.
You’re right, of course.
What it really means is that they got 17 complaints.
The hard bigotry of no expectations.
Heh.
Check out the lionizing of Tony Judt at the Chronicle for Higher Education.
Can’t wait for the Higher Education bubble to burst.
Elizabeth Warren was just the tip of the cheekbone.
Ha! Ha!
Good one Maine’s Michael!
“And, so that you will be more cautious in future, and an example for others to abstain from delinquencies of this sort, we order that the book Dialogue of Galileo Galilei be prohibited by public edict. We condemn you to formal imprisonment in this Holy Office at our pleasure.
As a salutary penance we impose on you to recite the seven penitential psalms once a week for the next three years. And we reserve to ourselves the power of moderating, commuting, or taking off, the whole or part of the said penalties and penances.
This we say, pronounce, sentence, declare, order and reserve by this or any other better manner or form that we reasonably can or shall think of. So we the undersigned Cardinals pronounce.”
How many critics are aware that Naomi Riley is married to a black man—and has two children by him? She is not exactly a good candidate fro membership in the KKK.
Interesting. And the fact that she didn’t bring it up in her defense shows that she is not a race monger. Admirable.
She should’ve said some of her best husbands are black.
I would have thought that to be a Major Critic would require both a major field of study that is being criticized and a person who devoted a significant part of his life to criticizing it. A single blog post on the ludicrously insignificant field of black studies as it currently exists would not seem to qualify on either.
I wonder if any of those academics are aware that the term “Brainstorm” was once not considered a positive descriptive?
Odd that people with such stunning intellectual abilities would not know the history on that.
But for McMillen to be cognizant of that would require a conscious act: a deliberate attempt to rise above the prevailing orthodoxy of her trade and question it from outside. One cannot expect conscious acts from those who have embraced unconsciousness.
The truth will always win out. I have and will never hire a grievance studies major.
CYA on that one; how intolerant and unenlightened… ; D
You just made a uniquely unenlightened comment yourself.
Why would anybody hire someone with a useless degree? They are uneducated and are only good at being professional whiners.
Um, there’s a WINK after the “intolerant and unenlightened” comment. Did that escape your notice?
Two points. First, it is clear that the Chronicle of Higher Education is an accurate barometer of its audience – it is a left wing enterprise. Second, we know that these individuals are not interested in the free exchange of ideas, that they engage in ad hominem attacks, and argue with tactics like labeling and discrediting the messenger. Yet they fraudulently claim to be tolerant, to welcome the exchange of ideas, and to promote rational discourse.
And to prove this is not an isolated incident, look at this review of “Ameritopia” CHE published. A left wing screed replete with personal attacks, labeling, irrelevant asides – all the exact same things Ms. Riley cited.
http://chronicle.com/article/Ameritopia-How-Dumb-Can/131485/
As many people air their disgust, I think they miss an important point.
These students are being cheated out of a useful education and the possibility of developing employable skills and an appropriate attitude for work.
The academic radicals understand this perfectly and I suspect it is intentional. These students are being prepared as the cannon fodder for overturning society when they realize at some point after graduation that their education did nothing to prepare them for gainful employment. They will react with fury and violence. Violence is the one area they may have the upper hand.
Marketable skills and work ethic aren’t important if you’re going to be on the dole. Survival in a democratic welfare state is more dependent on understanding victimhood, accepting dependence, and being loyal to the omniscient government. I was in Russia years ago, just after the democratic revolution. I asked a Ph.D. level individual what she thought about the changes and she said, “Who will take care of us now?” A perfect USSR citizen.
Interestingly, over half of Russians have college degrees, the highest proportion in Europe. It’s about 25% in Germany. The more college degrees, the more welfare dependence. No wonder Obama wants everybody to go to college.
Ugh! Russian degrees aren’t worth the paper they are printed on (just like our liberal degrees) and during the USSR time period their population was supposed to be 100% college educated.
We had a Russian woman working for us and she was so illiterate that when our boss asked her to write a memo for him he got so frustrated that he actually wrote it out for her himself. Even copying from that page she STILL got it wrong.
True story.
I once had to hire three electrical engineers. One was a Russian in his 50s with a master’s. One was a guy who worked as an engineer for a while, but had been working at his family’s jewelry story for the past 5 years. The third was fresh out of college, and had put himself through college working as a boxboy at Safeway.
We hired all three. The one right out of college was a superstar. The one from the jewelry store was meh. The Russian with the master’s degree literally didn’t know how to work. It’s not that he didn’t know his stuff technically, it’s that he literally, actually, didn’t know how to sit down and do anything. He’d rack up hours and hours and hours, and not have anything to show for it.
The quality of their education is one issue, but anyone who was employed by the Soviet government ends up completely ruined after 10 years, because they learn how to game the system and screw off instead of getting anything done.
We’re headed there.
Yes, and a perfect U.K. citizen, and a perfect French citizen, and a perfect German citizen, and a perfect New Orleans citizen, etc., etc.
This is the greatest of the many evils of statism (in all its guises). It destroys humanity, making docile cattle out of its “beneficiaries”.
Our public university system has been dealing with dramatic budget cuts for two consecutive years. We cannot get the new machinery or software we need to run our classes up to modern standards. But the victimization-grievance bureaucracy is expanding – Office of Social Equity (huh?), Office of Multicultural Affairs (which cultures? affairs with whom?), Women’s Center (at a school where the enrollment is majority female, apparently the top issue is understanding the history of contraceptives), etc.
I hear the Bigs are planning to start an education page. That might be a good place for Ms. Riley.
Reminds me of a line from a funky old Harry Connick Jr. song:
A magician did card tricks
for a bunch of well-heeled hicks
and held up a red six, one said;
“That’s a black seven!”
There are only two ways of telling the complete truth – anonymously and posthumously. ~Thomas Sowell
Honesty doesn’t always pay, but dishonesty always costs. ~Michael Josephson,
Truth is mighty and will prevail. There is nothing the matter with this, except that it ain’t so. ~Mark Twain, Notebook, 1935
In the late sixties I fought for and helped obtain a African American Studies Program at Merritt City College in Oakland, California. I also obtained a teaching credential to teach this subject. I was hired by the Berkeley Unified School District to teach Black History, only to be later reassigned when I tried to teach black history.
When I attended UC Berkeley I was hired as a teaching assistant to teach black history. I was later reassigned upon student protest. I and another assistannt wanted to teach on and emphasise the accomplishments of Black Indivisuals during slavery and jim crow. But all the vocal students in the class wanted only to hear “victimization claptrap”. After complaints to the Black Studies Chairman, my fellow teacher and I were reassigned.
In over 40 years things have not changed. I gave up on a carear in African American Studies and became a Lawyer. I now see that was a very wise decision.
Elvoyce Hooper
Attorney at Law, Retired
3545 E Ashlan Ave., Apt 184
Fresno, CA 93721-3050
This article and subsequent posts highlight a huge problem in our country. Blacks has far too much power over our national discourse and are unfairly reaping the benefits of our overly generous welfare state. Just say no.
Bingo! But only at the benevolence of the white progs. Again, and I repeat myself, they are too stupid to understand that they are back on the plantation.
Take this issue: If blacks were really worthy of the Ph.Ds. wouldn’t there be more black professors at white universities? Wouldn’t there be more black administrators and staff at white universities? So what explains the support that blacks receive from white progs but they are not making any headway at the REAL jobs which white progs currently enjoy.
Where are the blacks crying AA for some jobs but not with the white progs in higher academia? How about in the msm?
The perfect counter is for PJ Media to hire Naomi Schaefer Riley as one of their regular blog posters. Even trumpet the reason for her dismissal as the reason she was considered for inclusion here.
Give a place and a voice to writers like her.
Students and professors in bogus left-leaning fields such as Black Studies (or Women’s Studies, sociology, social psychology, etc.) possess no real knowledge or marketable skills. I majored in chemistry at my undergraduate institution, and took a few sociology courses to fulfill my “liberal arts” requirements. Completely bogus classes – just regurgitate the politicized garbage your professor talks about and you’ll get an easy A.
Ill just throw this out there for people that may be interested in this general topic.
What African-American Studies Could Be
John McWhorter
http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2009/09/by_john_mcwhorter_while_this.html
Ms. Riley hasn’t been silenced, just kicked off of the ‘soap-box’ that the Chronicle provided to her. She can continue to express her opinions and should, she just needs to start her own web site or find one with enough traffic and continue to give ‘em hell.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, La Tasha B. Levy and Ruth Hays respond (at SocialistWorker) to Riley: “Before the dirt has fully come to rest on the grave of Trayvon Martin, Black men and women, in the academy or outside of it, have never needed Harvard-educated white women to lecture us about the conditions in the communities we live in”.
It would seem, by their irrelevant but foolishly emotive mention of Martin, that the racialist, prejudiced trio of tripe-writers are accepting the main media’s narrative that Trayvon Martin was some sort of heroic, innocent victim of racism, rather than (as is more likely) a petty crook manqué who was shot in self-defence.
The Chronicle of Higher Education = Minitrue
Granting a degree in (fill-in-the-blank) Studies is the way academics validates the anger of the degree holder. I suppose such affirmation makes the degree recipient feel good about themselves. The problem is that such affirmation, along with about $2 will get you a cup of coffee at Starbucks, and not much else.
Outside of academia a degree in (fill-in-the-blank) Studies isn’t worth a damn.
Except to another holder of such degree, or an affirmative action administrator.
How the Academic Establishment has Silenced a Major Critic of the Field of “Black Studies”
Funny reading this on a site that largely silences dissent.
Yeah, they wouldn’t even let Patriot493 leave a snarky, indirect, unproven allegation of censorship in the Comments! Oppressors!