A few days ago the Wall Street Journal published a letter by Philip W. Semas, president and editor in chief of the Chronicle of Higher Education, that attempted — with no success — to defend the dismissal of Naomi Schaefer Riley, claiming her criticism of black studies in her 500 word blog post didn’t meet the Chronicle’s journalistic standards.
Since I have discussed the Chronicle’s disappointing behavior here, here, and here, I will not summarize the controversy, nor do I have much to add to George Leef’s response to Semas’s letter. But Semas’s central — in fact, only — complaint against Ms. Riley does deserve more attention.
Here is the sum and substance of the Chronicle’s justification for firing its former blogger:
… 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.
Leave aside the question of whether Ms. Riley was in fact glib and even whether glibness is a fatal, firing flaw of blog posts (if it is my editor, if I had one, would have fired me long ago). What undermines and gives the lie to Semas’s pitiful defense is that he has not fired staff reporter Stacey Patton, whose April 12 Chronicle pieces prompted Riley’s response. Patton’s article, “Black Studies: ‘Swaggering Into the Future,’” and a sidebar, “A New Generation of Black-Studies Ph.D.’s,” was every bit as “glib” in its uncritical, unresearched, unstinted praise of the field of black studies and the five exemplars she presented as Riley was in her criticism. Patton, a history (black studies?) PhD from Rutgers and former writer and editor for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, gave no evidence in her fawning article on the field of black studies or her star-struck interviews with doctoral students she presented as representative of its scholarly maturity that she had read any more than Riley had. Both relied on what the five stars Patton selected said.
If it is a firing offense to damn an entire field based on the self-described work of five “stars” the Chronicle’s own reporter selected and featured, why does it meet the Chronicle’s journalistic standards for that reporter to praise an entire field — Swaggering Into The Future! — based on no more than obsequious interviews with those same five graduate students?
Semas complained that Riley’s criticism was based on only “three dissertations” of the five presented as shining representatives of the new scholarly seriousness black studies. Perhaps he could point to which of the two she didn’t quote that refute the evaluation she based on the three.
UPDATE
Charlotte Allen says much the same thing here.
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