In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, there are several letters regarding the recent flap over The Chronicle of Higher Education’s decision to fire Naomi Schaefer Riley for having had the temerity to question the academic worth of black studies on its blog. The first of those letters is from the president and editor-in-chief of The Chronicle:
An editorial (“The Cravenness of Higher Education,” May 9) and an accompanying op-ed by Naomi Schaefer Riley (“The Academic Mob Rules”) excoriate the Chronicle of Higher Education for having dismissed Ms. Riley as a blogger on our website.
Contrary to your assertion, Ms. Riley was not dropped because she criticized black studies. She was dropped because she damned an entire academic discipline based on the titles and short descriptions of three dissertations. More importantly, when she was asked to respond, the response she provided did not offer any additional support for her glib assertion. That is a basic journalistic failing.Your editorial states that the Chronicle “stands ready to eliminate any writer who causes distress to the modern generation of scholars.” And in her op-ed, Ms. Riley asserts that “a substantive critique about the content of academic disciplines is simply impossible in the closed bubble of higher education.” In fact, we publish such articles all the time, including many by conservatives. And we have published articles critical of black studies. But they are well thought out, reasoned and supported by evidence, unlike Ms. Riley’s screed. That’s why she will no longer blog for us.
Philip W. Semas
President and Editor in Chief
The Chronicle of Higher Education Inc.
This is feeble. Why are “entire academic disciplines” immune from being “damned”? The point of her blog post was that there is in fact little “academic discipline” here. If people can earn their doctorates with nothing more than tendentious screeds (Semas’s word is certainly applicable to the dissertation that attacks black opponents of affirmative action), then there is good reason to question the standards of that discipline. The “journalistic failing” argument is just a red herring. Blog posts are not expected to withstand every possible counter-argument. They’re brief idea pieces. Comb through the posts of the other bloggers, and you’ll undoubtedly find ones that wouldn’t pass muster under the “standards” applied to Naomi’s.
What Semas won’t admit is that the first time a mob action demanding vengeance against a writer for having said something that made a lot of academics angry hit his publication, he caved in to it.