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.

The Daily Caller reported yesterday, based on excerpts from a new book obtained by the New York Post, that an “ally of then-Senator Barack Obama offered Rev. Jeremiah Wright $150,000 to keep his mouth shut until after the 2008 election.” According to Edward Klein, author of the new book, Wright told him that “[a]fter the media went ballistic on me, I received an e-mail offering me money not to preach at all until the November presidential election.”

That’s when Obama himself got involved, Wright said, and made a personal plea to keep Wright out of the spotlight.

“Barack said he wanted to meet me in secret, in a secure place. And I said, ‘You’re used to coming to my home, you’ve been here countless times, so what’s wrong with coming to my home?’ So we met in the living room of the parsonage of Trinity United Church of Christ, at South Pleasant Avenue right off 95th Street, just Barack and me. I don’t know if he had a wire on him. His security was outside somewhere.”

…. According to Wright, he also received a short lecture from Obama on the necessity of sometimes stretching the truth.

On one level there’s no surprise here. I doubt there’s anyone in the country who doubts that Obama practices what he preached to his preacher, that he was “stretching the truth” when he denied knowing of Rev. Wright’s racist and anti-American rants. There’s more here, however, than just the expected lying. If what Rev. Wright says in this new book is right, candidate Obama engaged in the very behavior that led his own Justice Dept. to indict John Edwards.

The President told ABC News that the issue should be left to the states, which are “arriving at different conclusions at different times.” The problem with the President’s position, Adler points out,

is that it cannot be reconciled with the Administration’s stance on the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act. According to Attorney General Eric Holder, he and the President concluded that the constitutionality of legal distinctions based upon sexual preference cannot be defended. In their view, because DOMA precludes federal recognition of same-sex marriages, it violates the constitutional guarantee of equal protection under the Fifth Amendment. Further, according to Holder’s statement, they concluded that no “reasonable” constitutional argument could be made in DOMA’s defense. Yet if DOMA is unconstitutional under equal protection, which applies to the state and federal governments equally, then how could any state law barring recognition of same-sex marriages survive constitutional scrutiny? In other words, while the President says he believes that states should be allowed to reach “different conclusions at different times” on the question of same-sex marriage, the administration’s legal position is that a state’s refusal to treat opposite-sex and same-sex couples alike is unconstitutional. So while the President may say he’d like to leave this question to the states, that’s an option his administration has already taken off the table.

If DOMA — “a federal law,” Adler notes, “supported by Senators Biden, Dodd, Reid and Wellstone — and signed into law by President Clinton” — is indefensible on equal protection grounds, then the laws of North Carolina and the thirty or so states that have similar laws are all unconstitutional on the same grounds.

It is easy to conclude — as a number of those who have commented on Adler’s post do — that Obama is simply either prevaricating or lying, trying to hold on to the support of those who favor same sex marriage by stating his personal opinion while attempting to reassure voters in states that oppose it that he has no desire to overturn their laws that limit marriage to one man and one woman.

It is also easy to highlight the lack of clarity about the principle informing the President’s new (or at least current) position. If the principle of equal protection, for example, elevates an individual’s sexual preference for members of his or her own sex to a fundamental right that precludes a majority’s ability to codify a traditional view of marriage limited to one man and one woman, why should the equally strong preferences of those who want to marry more than one other person deserve the same equal protection? Why, that is, does that newly minted right also preclude limitation of marriage to two (unrelated?) people?

The fact that both those observations are easy doesn’t mean they’re wrong, but I’d like to emphasize something else that I found striking about the President’s recent statement. Consider:

“I asked myself right after that [June 2011] New York vote took place, if I had been a state senator, which I was for a time, how would I have voted?” Obama told Roberts. “And I had to admit to myself, ‘You know what? I think that I would have voted yes.’

“It would have been hard for me, knowing all the friends and family that are gays or lesbians, that for me to say to them, you know, ‘I voted to oppose you having the same kind of rights and responsibilities that I have,’” he said….

“At a certain point, I’ve just concluded that, for me personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married,” he said.

I, of course, added emphasis above, but it seems to me that, far from distorting Obama’s intent, the added emphasis actually reveals the only authority he recognizes: his own opinion. The scientific question, I suppose, is whether “evolution” has ended with the above Obama-centered statement, or will it continue into as yet uncharted territories such as polygamy, polyamory, etc.

The real question that this “for me personally” position virtually shouts, however, is whether Obama’s personal support for same sex marriage is simply another version of the “personal” opposition to abortion of Catholic Democrats who in fact never actually opposed any pro-abortion policies or court opinions.

Or perhaps what Obama is really doing here is asking voters to give him “space” now, as he famously asked Medvedev regarding missile defense when he thought no one else was listening, because “[a]fter my election … I have more flexibility.”

Perhaps the best test of the policy implications, if any, of the President’s personal support for same sex marriage is whether (now? “after my election”? never?) he will sign the executive order prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity that has been awaiting his signature, which I discussed here and which gay and left groups have begun to demand more loudly.

For some reason the fact that Asian Americans are the primary victims of affirmative action — for example, according to a leading scholar I quoted here, Asian Americans have to score 450 points higher on the SAT to have an equal chance of admission to a selective university as an otherwise similarly qualified black — does not make the list.

First, like everyone else he dismisses Warren’t explanation that she listed herself as Native American so she could get invited to lunch with other Native Americans, at least until she got to Harvard and stopped so listing herself. This lame explanation, according to Kahlenberg, undercut Warren’s “greatest strength: that unlike most politicians, worried about offending wealthy donors, she is a straight-shooter, willing to tell it like it is.” Whether or not Warren is more willing to offend her supporters than other politicians is, I think, an open question, but Kahlenberg’s assertion that “[h]er questionable explanation is unfortunately typical of discussions of affirmative action” is true but rather limp. “Years ago,” Kahlenberg writes, “when a conservative opponent of affirmative action leaked the lower median test scores of black students at Georgetown Law School, school leaders, rather than defending the diversity program outright, suggested unpersuasively that the discrepancy might be explained by the superior essays of minority students.”

Years ago? Defenders of affirmative action continually haul out that unpersuasive possibility. After criticizing the work of a leading scholar of affirmative action, Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade, for arguing that the “softer variables” may explain the vast gap separating the test scores of admitted blacks and Hispanics from Asians, I concluded that “[i]f these passages mean anything they mean that those Asians may look good on paper (grades, test scores, etc.), but for all Espenshade knows they may all share an inability to write admissions essays that can compete with those written by blacks and Hispanics and a similar inability to garner enthusiastic letters of recommendations from their teachers.”

Kahlenberg’s second and third criticisms of affirmative action suggested by Warren’s bad example are quite similar: that someone whose ”ties are weak” to their group reinforces the notion that affirmative action ”rarely helps the most disadvantaged minority group members” and that intermarriage insures that “the number of beneficiaries with relatively weak ties will increase.” These are bad, according to Kahlenberg, because “[t]he great moral authority behind affirmative-action policies comes from the fact that they benefit those who inherit the disadvantages associated with horrendous crimes, such as slavery, segregation, and the decimation of Native Americans.”

Really? Whether or not affirmative action actually has any “great moral authority,” the Supreme Court certainly doesn’t recognize this as it. “Diversity” is now the sole justification the Court recognizes as justifying the racial and ethnic discrimination that is at the core of affirmative action programs. And that means that “disadvantaged minority group members” are not, and are not even intended to be, the “beneficiaries” of affirmative action. Those who benefit from whatever “diversity” offers are not the preferentially admitted minorities — who, after all, would receive those benefits even if they attended less selective institutions — but whites and Asians who would be deprived of exposure to them.

Fourth, Kahlenberg properly describes Warren’s reference to her grandfather’s “high cheekbones” as highlighting “the creepiest aspect of racial preference programs,” their reliance on genetic racial identity. He might have added that Warren’s claim of 1/32 Cherokee identity calls to mind the old “one drop” rule from the segregated South as well as the fact that it undermines any claim that she could provide any Cherokee “diversity” to anyone else.

All of these rather tepidly offered criticisms, however, serve merely as preface to Kahlenberg’s attempt to look “on the bright side” of what Warren’s worst week can contribute to the future of affirmative action, what he predictably calls the “progressive alternative: affirmative action based on class.”

Warren grew up in a working-class family (her father was a janitor), and polls indicate Americans support giving a leg up to college applicants who come from economically disadvantaged families and have overcome odds. You can defend that policy plainly and openly, and do not have to resort to reasoning that strains credulity, as Elizabeth Warren has in recent days.

Preferences based on economic disadvantage can certainly be defended “plainly and openly” — they don’t, for example, trample on any fundamental principle such as the right to treated “without regard” to race, creed, or color — but Warren makes almost as poor a poster child for class-based preference as she does for Cherokee- based preference. She didn’t need such a preference when she was admitted to law school at Rutgers. And even if by some liberal stretch she needed a class-based boost to be hired at the University of Houston Law Center, after serving there as assistant professor, associate professor, and associate dean, she hardly needed any such boost when hired by the University of Texas at Austin, or after that the University of Pennsylvania, or after that at Harvard.

Unless class-based boosts expire after a use or two, even by Kahlenberg’s rather limited criteria they will become as unfair as race-based privileges given to undeserving (because un-disadvantaged) minorities.

ADDENDUM

Elizabeth Warren now accuses her Republican opponent, Scott Brown, of “raising ugly insinuations” about her, of ”launching ‘ugly innuendos’ about how she got her law school teaching jobs.” (HatTip InstaPundit)

Hmm. Would those ugly “insinuations” and “innuendos” be that she benefitted from affirmative action? Is she, that is, accusing him of accusing her of benefitting from preferential policies that she supports? Sounds like it.

“People have made it clear I work hard. I am a good teacher and I have gotten my jobs on my merits,” she said in Worcester. People who are hired or promoted under affirmative action, then, i.e., people who really do belong to the minority racial or ethnic group they claim to, by implication are hired or promoted even though they don’t work hard, are not good teachers or students, and have insufficient merit to get hired or promoted without the extra benefit they are given because of their race or ethnicity.

With defenders like this, does affirmative action really need any critics?