Chronicle of Higher Ed blogger advocates eliminating Black Studies
The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations.
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.
Right-wing shit-ticket "journalist" Naomi Schaefer Riley (who doesn't hold a graduate degree) decides to condemn an entire humanities discipline based on the titles (and, arguably, the abstracts) of dissertations by doctoral candidates which she not only hadn't read, but couldn't read because they aren't finished yet. Cue widespread and impassioned response:
The Inferiority of Blackness as a Subject
Schaefer Riley went after, arguably, the most powerless group of people in all of academe: doctoral students who lack the political cover of tenure, institutional support, or extensive professional networks. She attacked junior scholars who have done nothing but tried to fulfill the requirements of their degree program and who had the audacity to be recognized for doing so in academia’s largest publication. Their crime is not being fucking* invisible.For that, for daring to be seen and heard Schaefer Riley eviscerates the hard work of doctoral students.
And she does not even afford them the respect of critiquing their actual scholarship. That is beneath her. She attacks the very veracity of their right to choose what scholarship they will do. In effect, she attacks their right to be agents in their own academic careers.
She eschews their dissertation titles as laughable. She pokes fun at their subject matter. She all but calls them stupid.
And The Chronicle of Higher Education let her.
The Chronicle eventually released this statement (and Riley) after a 6000+ petition:
We now agree that Ms. Riley’s blog posting did not meet The Chronicle’s basic editorial standards for reporting and fairness in opinion articles. As a result, we have asked Ms. Riley to leave the Brainstorm blog....
In addition, my Editor’s Note last week inviting you to debate the posting also seemed to elevate it to the level of informed opinion, which it was not. I also realize that, as the controversy unfolded last week, our response on Twitter did not accurately convey The Chronicle’s message.
I sincerely apologize for the distress these incidents have caused our readers and appreciate that so many of you have made your sentiments known to us.
Cue usual braying about systematic and institutionalized silencing of conservative voices in the academy:
We can all sleep safely now. Or as a friend wrote, "The liberal mob has spoken. The expiation has occurred. The new gods of diversity are satisfied. The sun will rise tomorrow."This does confirm for me that academia is far and away the least tolerant, least diverse, least interesting and most petty environment in which to work.
OMG. I wish I didn't know about this, then I feel guilty about wishing that... Thanks a lot, CF.
Here's the footnote after "fucking invisible":
I would personally have had a hard time confining myself to a single cuss word. I'd never make it in academia. Even the USian model.
Seems unfair to beat up on graduate students when a well-nigh perfect example of nonsense is already available:
http://online.physics.uiuc.edu/courses/phys419/spring11/lectures/Sokal-t...
Don't get me started on the self-important Sokal hoax. Surely, if humanities scholarship is such a scam, you have more than the sixteen-year-old brayings of an ignorant braggart to go on? At any rate, it's off topic.
And if I didn't know better, I'd say your post verges on baiting the OP--even if he is a moderator.
Ouch. I thought the Sokal piece was funny. Didn't you? And I don't think he's all that ignorant: if you read his book "Fashionable Nonsense" (written with Jean Bricmont) then you can find a more detailed explanation of what he was parodying, and why. As I understand it, his target is not humanities scholarship, but the strain of post-modernism that trails off into incomprehensibility.
ETA: Anyway, if you think this is off-topic, I will clam up.
I know it's too much to expect that right-wing anti-intellectuals write anything remotely logical, but reading this made my brain hurt so much I may have to stop reading altogether ...
[drift]ygtbk: I should have had a smilie at the end of my post--re-reading it, it does look like I come off a bit harsh, but I meant it in good fun.
I don't have a soft spot for Sokal, though. He exploited a lapse in editorial rigour (which he aggressively angled for) and an act of collegiality and good faith (the journal was not peer reviewed) to launch a full-scale attack on left-wing academic scholarship in general, which he didn't understand or try to. The folk he was parodying--Baudrillard, Derrida, Butler, Lyotard, Haraway, etc.--are all left-leaning thinkers and writers who could eat his old leftism for lunch if they wished. [/drift]
@Rebecca No kidding. The bigger problem is that such ludicrous statements actually pre-emptively short circuit valid criticisms about diversity in the academy--a problem Black Studies is actually trying to foreground and combat.
On The CHE‘s Reinforcement Of Suspicion Of Black Academia