Moments after delivering the commencement address at Barnard College, the president may have said something he didn’t intend the audience to hear.

It’s shaping up to be a rough month for black-studies programs; a new turn of the wheel at UNC-Chapel Hill adds credence to Naomi Schaefer Riley’s assertion that it’s time to reassess their value and intent. Academic fraud perpetrated by the head of Carolina’s Department of African and Afro-American Studies, Julius Nyang’oro, has gotten so bad that North Carolina’s State Bureau of Investigation may be called in to investigate. The department seems to have gone rogue, according to a Raleigh News & Observer article:

The findings of an internal UNC probe released this month found 54 classes within the department in which there was little or no indication of instruction. The review also found at least 10 cases of unauthorized grade changes involving students who did not complete their work.

The internal probe began as part of an investigation into abuses in the school’s football program. The spotlight fell on African and Afro-American Studies when it was discovered that a football player had not only received illegal help from a tutor on a paper for one of Dr. Nyang’oro’s classes, but had plagiarized most of the paper (and plagiarized so badly that it was almost impossible not to detect it, though Nyang’oro still managed to do so). Scholarship football and basketball players took courses in the department at an exceptionally high rate — not likely a coincidence.

It also may not be a coincidence that it was the African and Afro-American Studies department in which the corruption occurred; shoddy ethical standards go hand-in-hand with shoddy intellectual standards. Perhaps it’s time to consider dumping all college departments that exist primarily for political, not academic, reasons. Other ethnic studies, women’s studies, gender studies, and climate-change studies spring to mind.

The New York Times has a lengthy piece on students facing financially crippling college debt. These articles are nothing new for readers of this site, yet that doesn’t make this one any less worthy of your attention.

Additionally, any college-students-to-be should be mindful of the following quote at the beginning of the article from a new Ohio Northern graduate:

“As an 18-year-old, it [Ohio Northern] sounded like a good fit to me, and the school really sold it. I knew a private school would cost a lot of money. But when I graduate, I’m going to owe like $900 a month. No one told me that.”

College is still a good fit for many people, but there needs to be more awareness of the dollars and cents involved in paying back loans. Many graduates owe the equivalent of car, rent, or mortgage payments — but there is no car, apartment, or home.

In a Pope Center piece, Jane Shaw analyzes a talk given by George Washington University’s president emeritus, Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, at a higher-ed event last year. (It was the keynote address at a forum put on by Cato and the Center for College Affordability and Productivity.) Trachtenberg said that higher ed will have about 20 years before all hell breaks loose. Jane thinks that’s off by just about 20 years. All hell is starting to break loose now.

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.

Writing on the Chronicle’s Innovations blog, Richard Kahlenberg observes that it was a bad week for both Elizabeth Warren and affirmative action. He senses that lots of people think the idea that you deserve some special treatment because you might be one-thirty-second Cherokee is ridiculous. Naturally, though, Kahlenberg sees a bright side here — for his pet project of “class-based affirmative action.” You see, Warren’s dad was a janitor.

Raise your hand if you think it’s silly that a law-school graduate should be get special consideration because of some distant ancestry, but perfectly reasonable to give it because she grew up in a working-class family.

Robin Murray, whom I met several years ago when I gave a talk on our overselling of higher education at Georgia State College and University, has begun a blog entitled Invisible Serfs Collar, which gives you an idea of what she thinks about the role of formal education.

Try it — you’ll like it!