Higher Education Blogger Fired For Criticizing African-American Students
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- Category: Uncensored News
- Published on Tuesday, 08 May 2012 05:41
Academia’s outsized love of political correctness is, by this point, infamous. But did you know that journalism pertaining to academia is now being expected to follow similar standards?
No? Neither did Naomi Schaefer Riley, a higher education reporter with 15 years experience who was recently fired from the Chronicle of Higher Education for criticizing several black PhD students for giving their discipline a bad name by writing about unserious topics.
Naomi Schaefer Riley
Let’s start from the beginning. On April 20, 2012, the Chronicle of Higher Education ran an article titled “A New Generation of Black Studies Ph.D’s.” The article was essentially a collection of five short profiles, which are reproduced below for the reader to peruse:
Schaefer Riley, on reading this article, fired off a blog post in response, noting (rather tartly) that several of the dissertation projects mentioned weren’t exactly focused on objective, substantive scholarship – in fact, they sounded like they resembled political hackery more than anything else:
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 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?
The initial response to this blog post was, to put it mildly, apopleptic, as the comments rapidly degenerated into accusations of racism and bullying. This prompted Schaefer Riley to write yet another blog post defending herself from