Back in May, conservative writer Naomi Schaefer Riley managed to get herself fired from The Chronicle of Higher Education. The Chronicle had run a cover story about black-studies Ph.D. students at Northwestern University (my alma mater, as it happens). Continuing with that theme, Riley wrote a blog post on the Chronicle’s website entitled “The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations” — though as critics soon pointed out, she had not, in fact, read the dissertations.
Instead, she dismissed their topics as self-evidently absurd, much the way a judge might throw out a weak case before the trial starts. She briefly described the students’ essays, including one about how black experiences are neglected in the natural-birth literature, one about how black conservatives are betraying the civil-rights movement, and one about how the federal government’s subsidizing of single-family homes for blacks in the 1970s was secretly racist. Riley found these ideas to range from “irrelevant” to “liberal hackery”: “What a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap.” In the resulting outcry, thousands signed a petition to get Riley fired, and the Chronicle obliged.
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