LITTLE ROCK — By now the Chronicle of Higher Education should be well-known in Arkansas, and not for good reasons. This is the publication that, with a straight face, repeated the conclusion of a “study” by Project Vote Smart listing this state’s legislature as the poorest educated in the country.
Lord knows our legislators have their share of faults (who doesn’t?) but compared to Vote Smart’s alleged researchers, they’re the soul of competence.
Vote Smart concluded that fully a a quarter of Arkansas lawmakers had no college at all, including the lawyers and professors among them. It was the kind of assertion that wouldn’t have got past any halfway decent editor. But all the Chronicle of Higher Education did was just repeat it.
As for the source of this generously dispersed misinformation, Project Vote Smart never apologized, not to my knowledge. It preferred to blame the legislators themselves.
Since many of them hadn’t bothered to respond to its survey, it concluded they had no college experience to report.
It was an assumption not even a rookie reporter would make, certainly not if he had a halfway decent editor looking over his shoulder. But nobody at Project Vote Dumb or the Chronicle of Higher Education bothered to do the slightest fact-checking. That might have come dangerously close to responsible journalism.
Now the Chronicle of Higher Education has struck again. When one of its bloggers criticized the current state of Black Studies on campus, she set off a mass protest. At last count, some 6,500 academics had signed a solemn petition demanding that Naomi Schaefer Riley, the blogger in question, be fired.
And fired she was. When pressed, the Chronicle turned out to have a backbone of spaghetti.
The lady’s crime? She’d pointed out, as others have, that many of the courses dubbed Black Studies “appear to be a series of axes that faculty members would like to grind.” And grind away they do.
Critics of academe who note this kind of ideology masquerading as scholarship are bound to be called racists, to cite one of the more polite names hurled at Naomi Riley. A longtime observer of the lower trends in higher education, Ms. Riley was subjected to a flood of taunts that, in her words, ranged from “puerile to vitriolic.” Nobody can say her work had gone unnoticed.
The Chronicle’s editor-in-chief-yes, it actually has an editor, or at least someone styled as such-claimed she was fired not because her opinions were unacceptable but because, in the course of presenting them, she’d cited some of the sillier dissertation titles in the field she was criticizing.
Said editor-in-chief didn’t claim the titles were inaccurate. Her sin seems to have been that she’d mentioned them. And when she did, the response from those running the Chronicle was simple. Shut up, they explained.
Naomi Riley is scarcely the first observer to note the academic crimes committed in the name of Black Studies. N.B. She wasn’t asserting that the history of black Americans (not to mention the literature, religion and, good Lord, the music of Black America!) isn’t worth teaching. On the contrary, she was demanding that it be taught well.
Strangely enough, the Chroniclehad hired Ms. Riley specifically to present the conservative point of view in order to balance its usual educanto. But when she did, she had to go.
Well, sure. Hers is not an unusual experience for anyone who dares criticize the banalities of academe. Indeed, it’s almost a tradition. It goes back at least to the last century, when Booker T.
Washington was being denounced as an Uncle Tom for asserting that self-reliance is an essential requisite for advancing the rights and fortunes of black Americans.
For that matter, the original Uncle Tom of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous novel/melodrama that roused American public opinion against slavery was no Uncle Tom-not in the current, derisive use of the term. Rather he was a stoic hero who practiced nonviolent resistance in a way Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. would later advocate.
But the grievance collectors of the world may be less interested in eliminating the grievances than in exploiting them. Booker T. Washington once wrote of those who “make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs-partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.’’ Welcome, Naomi Schaefer Riley to a long line of truth-tellers. It’s a distinguished club, but the price of admission can be high.
Paul Greenberg is editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. E-mail him at: pgreenberg@arkansasonline.com
Perspective, Pages 73 on 05/20/2012