I let the Riley controversy fly by me this week, because I was absorbed in other matters. It unexpectedly picked up a lot of steam with attention from every blogger and pundit. My two cents:
I've never taken or taught a class within a black studies department, so I can't say too much about the vigor of that particular department. However, race is extremely relevant to the subject of political science and a perfectly legitimate element of study. It comes into play when talking about representation and voting patterns. It is a huge element of urban politics, political theory, and political history. Is race studied enough within political science? Absolutely not. It is an important lens for understanding political action in this country, and there are not enough people doing work in this area.
The study of race is also an important within other traditional departments in the liberal arts, like History, Literature, and Sociology.
Does it deserve its own department? In an era of scarce resources, can we afford to maintain other interdisciplinary departments, like American Studies or Environmental Policy? These are fair questions that should be debated.
Riley could have taken that tack and she would have had a perfectly legitimate argument. What bothered me most about Riley's post was that she targeted the dissertations of grad students. All dissertations are extremely narrow in scope and can be easily mocked by outsiders as parochial and silly. Also, it's plain mean to mock a defenseless grad student, who doesn't have a job yet or platform to respond to criticism in a major industry newspaper.
More about the controversy from James Joyner.
Apt. 11d 
I think the bigger issue is whether a department should be explicitly identified with an ideology. ESsentially what Riley was saying is that Black Studies -like women’s studies, gender studies and a few others that I can’t think of right now — has an explicit set of beliefs that you MUST ACCEPT in order to do work within that department. In other words, if you’re interested in the study of race in America but you don’t buy into the Black Studies paradigm (there is a great deal of institutionalized racism in the US; reparations are necessary; anyone who is white is guilty in some way and needs to acknowledge that; knowledge that is gained by virtue of one’s identity and lived experience trumps other types of knowledge in certain situations) then you can’t play.
In the interests of full disclosure here, I’m an Evangelical Christian who is also interested in feminist issues. I always felt like I couldn’t take courses in my university’s Women’s Studies department because my views would have been a priori dismissed as illegitimate. Because I couldn’t sign off on the Statement of Faith (if you will) of the Women’s Studies Department (there is institutionalized gender discrimination in the US; women’s lived experiences sometimes trump other kinds of knowledge; abortion is good; marriage is bad), I couldn’t take those courses — even though at a public university, my tax dollars would have been used to support these courses, and these professors.
In this way, Black Studies and WOmen’s Studies (and ‘studies’ in general, I guess) ARE different than what goes on in a political science department. (I’m similarly miffed that the Feminist Studies section of the APSA has been renamed the LGBT Studies section — again, with an implicit agenda, statement of faith, and set of beliefs that automatically exclude people like me). No one is excluded from the poli sci department.
To play devil’s advocate, I guess you could argue that Public health also has an implicit agenda which would make it difficult to sign on if you were, for example, a Christian Scientist, a Jehovah’s Witness, etc. — but I do think it’s unusual for a social science department to have such a pronounced ideological litmus test, and thus an exclusionary dimension.
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I can’t comment about Women’s Studies Departments, but I can talk about the feminism subsection of APSA. I know the people who run that subsection. They may have their own clearly identified agendas, but they are traditional political scientists and they will accept papers to the conference that challenge their beliefs. They aren’t ideologues.
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I’ve never been asked to sign off on those ‘creeds’ when I cross-list courses and attend faculty meetings in Women’s Studies, Louisa. I’m sorry that you felt that ideology trumped academics there but I believe that is more a boogeyman than a universal truth.
Laura, what enraged me about the Riley column was not only that she chose to attack a field by attacking the graduate students, but that she also disparaged their theses on the basis of the titles alone. That’s rather like dismissing an entire genre based on a few covers: intellectually dishonest and indefensible. It was worse because she was doing so from a pulpit provided by the premier periodical in higher education where one would expect an interest in academic rigour.
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“there is a great deal of institutionalized racism in the US; reparations are necessary; anyone who is white is guilty in some way and needs to acknowledge that; knowledge that is gained by virtue of one’s identity and lived experience trumps other types of knowledge in certain situations”
With all due respect, what the fuck? I wasn’t specifically in a black studies program, but since I studied with Skip Gates, I sort of feel like I count, and … wtf? I’m sorry, but I was never given a copy of the Black Studies Agenda, and if I had, I would have ignored it. The same for Women’s Studies, and I was actually more officially in programs in Women’s Studies at Duke and then as a faculty member (adjunct) at another university.
When I was working on my diss one summer in Durham (I’d taken 2 months leave from my job in academic administration), I was kind of lonely because I’d been away for a few years and all my friends had finished and left, and so I went to Women’s Studies events, including a weekly discussion group. One of the women there was an evangelical Christian who was interested in feminist issues. From what I saw, she was welcomed just as much as anyone else. One of my best friends in grad school at Duke was anti-abortion, and somehow, we managed to be friends and talk about stuff anyway. Come to think of it, there was another student who finished his diss in 91 who was also conservative Christian (I just looked up his CV and he graduated from BYU as an undergrad, so I am thinking LDS) and he wrote a diss that reflected his views. AT DUKE. In the late 80s. You remember Duke in the late 80s. Ground Zero in the culture wars. The Wall Street Journal told me that everyone at Duke was politically correct in the late 80s, so it must be true!
You seem to be falling into Riley’s trap (I’m addressing Louisa here)–you’re making assumptions about what you think will happen instead of finding out what would happen. Yeah, it’s scary to be around people you think might disagree with you, but seriously? Do it anyway. Grow a backbone. Express your ideas. What’s going to happen? If you’re like my fellow students in the grad program at Duke, you might end up, oh, I don’t know, getting a PhD.
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Duke is surrounded by scary forests that always make me thing of Ashley Judd running from a serial killer. I’m not saying don’t get a Ph.D. at Duke, but maybe don’t see Kiss the Girls right before you go there.
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“make me think of”
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Someone mentioned in a previous thread that the reason Black Studies and Women’s Studies exist is because scholarship in those areas of study were never given footholds in traditional disciplines like political science and history. Maybe someday they will be welcomed into the fold but we’re not there yet(clearly, based on Riley’s blog post) so that’s why we need them.
I think the bigger issue is whether a department should be explicitly identified with an ideology.
There’s a big difference between requiring a Statement of Faith to participate and general agreement on issues where the accepted thinking is no longer considered controversial. Yes, most if not all Black Studies scholars probably think that there is a great deal of institutionalized racism in the US but that’s not saying much since that is likely a widely-held belief in the traditional disciplines as well. Some of the other items on your ideological checklist sound like pure projection. I don’t have a lot of knowledge about Black Studies but I would guess there isn’t universal agreement that reparations are necessary and that anyone who is white is guilty in some way and needs to acknowledge that.
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I was done before Kiss the Girls came out, so I’m good. 🙂
Btw, I was living in Durham when they filmed Bull Durham, though I missed out on all the filming, and I also spent the next few summers trying to catch a rare refreshing breeze in the stands at the old park. I think we could get $1 beers (small, but $1) and cheap burritos. Good times….
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I was there after the new stadium was up. I still don’t understand why everybody was so hot for burritos. It’s two pounds of flour around two pounds of rice seasoned with cheese. You need an enchilada.
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You can’t eat an enchilada with one hand while you have a beer in the other. I’m just sayin’….
I went to the new stadium too. Nice, but man, that old stadium was so old school. It felt like being at a high school baseball game. I lived in Durham for I don’t know how many years with very little AC other than going to the ballpark. Crazy.
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What bothered me about Riley’s blog post on the Chronicle site was that there was no recognition of how scholarly work might contribute to a conversation that does indeed affect policy. The dissertation on “Black Women’s Authoritative Knowledge on Childbirth”, for example, did strike me, as someone who has read a lot of the natural birth literature (yes, Naomi, this body of work exists!), as having validity and would seem to have particular relevance to conversations about and policymaking for African-American women giving birth in 21st century hospitals. I got the feeling that Riley isn’t a big fan of humanities scholarship in general.
As for “scarce resources”, many interdisciplinary studies programs are run under the aegis of a traditional department, using its administrative resources and don’t really take very much in terms of resources. If the resources are really scarce, shed administrative jobs or eliminate luxuries before blowing up academic programs. Do we really need a climbing wall on campus? How about that Coordinator of Greek Life?
Finally, I think the “my tax dollars… these courses … public university” argument is flawed. I also went to a public university, and my tax dollars were being used to support a Business School teaching college students the capitalist ideology of how to maximize stockholder profits at the expense of all else. One person’s “ideology” is another’s “reality”.
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Two points:
1. Riley’s CHE blog post was offensive and racist and worthy of firing. Her WSJ editorial (at least, the part of it quoted), struck me as reasonably argued, even though I disagree with it. She was not fired for the WSJ editorial, though, and its existence does not retroactively make the CHE post acceptable.
2. Ok, so I certainly do not want to be defending Louisa, and Wendy is certainly right in her mindset of WTF, but I think there’s a little more going on here. And it is not really about the intellectual diversity that exists among people earning Master’s Degrees and PhD’s in Minority-Studies Departments.
So, a good friend of mine is caught up in Adjunct Hell, where she teaches 4 classes at 3 different colleges — mostly largish intro classes in topics that might get lumped together with Minority Studies (titles like “Introduction to Cultural Anthropology” and such.) In every one of her classes, there are 35-40 well behaved, interested, engaged students of all cultural background. And then there is also a single White Male Conservative who completely rejects all of the premises in all of the texts and discussions, and attempts to hijack every class conversation by (depending on the particulars of the White Male Conservative is question) pointing out all the discrimination white people face, or citing medical studies showing the moral degeneracy of the homosexual, or whatever.
And then the teacher has to say, “Stop derailing the class,” which is taken by the White Male Conservative as being cast out for not accepting the Statement of Faith, but is viewed by the teacher the same way as a high school biology teacher who is challenged on the truth of the Theory of Evolution when all he wants to do is explain Gregor Mendel’s studies on recessive genes in bean plants. “Maybe you are right and whites are the true oppressed race in America, but right now we are discussing Chapter 3 of ‘Delusions of Gender’ . . .”
And certainly that White Male Conservative will be writing an article one day about his first hand experience in a Minority Studies, and how he would not accept the teacher’s Statement of Faith. And in a certain, very narrow sense, he is right that there’s probably no class on campus where the primary topic is how white people are becoming more and more oppressed. But more broadly the problem is that the lone White Male Conservative is a jackass.
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“Wendy is certainly right in her mindset of WTF”
I’ve come to the conclusion that this is a mindset that is always right. 🙂
Michael Berube wrote thoughtfully about the problem of the Lone Conservative Hijacking Student here: http://chronicle.com/article/Should-I-Have-Asked-John-to/5744 (behind paywall)
and Erin O’Connor responded here: http://www.erinoconnor.org/archives/2003/12/profiling_the_c.html
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There’s a really interesting discussion of the Riley firing over at the Rod Dreher blog.
Ragtime – You’ve posted several times that Riley’s initial blog entry was racist. This isn’t immediately obvious to me so perhaps you can explain why you consider it racist.
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I find this whole conversation quite odd. Primarily because it seems to speak about political conflicts that are not really about the perception of Blackness, but about the internal dynamics of American academia. I don’t know how connected Black Studies in the US is to any political agenda. But, here African history and history of the Black diaspora are just descriptions of subjects studied and not indications of any particular approach or political orientation. I suppose the equivalent in the US would be European history and US history. Although we do have European history here too. I taught it this last year. None of my Black male conservative students were a problem. I had no White male students in those classes.
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Me again. Maybe I overstated the case — but I went to Wellesley in the 1980’s and did my PhD at the University of Michigan in the late 1980’s and I believe that in both places there was a sort of feminist Statement of Faith and that at Wellesley there still is. I know I’m an old fogey but this was in the days of Andrea Dworkin and ‘all marriage is rape’ and even now at Wellesley the assumption is that if your beliefs don’t include support for homosexual marriage or transgendered individuals serving in the military (or attending Wellesley), well then you had better reexamine your beliefs because they are backward and nonsensical.
And while you can suggest that it is always up to the Evangelical Christian to be the lone person standing up defending their beliefs, I can also understand why my child isn’t going to want to do that, and why not a lot of people sign up for that option. When I was at Michigan, there was a lot of discussion of the World Values Survey and the idea that religion was an artefact that always goes away as people become smarter and better educated, just like gender roles. I never did feel like I could stand up in any graduate seminar and take the view that religion is not an artefact solely clung to by stupid people. THe funny thing is that after 911, a lot more people starting reexamining the assumption that religion is something old-fashioned that doesn’t matter in today’s political world.
I’m thinking maybe it’s a combination of the ideological litmus test and a selection bias, in terms of who chooses to teach in such programs and who chooses to take classes in those departments. And I think your stereotype of the disruptive, hostile white male conservative is both a stereotype and a straw man. I don’t think that anytime someone disagrees with the professor’s agenda, they should be told that they have poor social skills and that they are the problem.
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Some more data points for folks who give a shit about what’s real, which is not everyone who has seen fit to anoint the latest martyr (Andrew Sullivan, I’m looking at you).
1) This is not a new kind of attack and it is not targeted at Black Studies exclusively. Race is in the mix as *an* issue, this time, but it isn’t always. The “scan the titles and mock the work while refusing to know anything more about it” is a subgenre of anti-academic writing/blogging. It’s always unprofessional and trashy. I think this is the first time it’s been published in a non-partisant magazine dedicated to the journalistic coverage of academic affairs, though.
2) Black Studies programs at most institutions are not departments with their own tenure lines. So the extent to which they actually consume meaningful resources of any kind is something to look at on a case-by-case basis. More frequently, they’re interdisciplinary programs that cross-list courses that would be taught anyway within their departments of origin, and provide students who want to focus on the interdisciplinary study of black history, sociology and culture a certification. So before you get all bothered about the need to save money and all, consider the specifics.
3) Black Studies programs or departments are often ideologically quite heterogenous on purpose–and scholars who are often read or discussed in courses listed by those programs can be quite critical of the intellectual and curricular approach of some or all Black Studies practicioners. This is not a field that has never been criticized up to this moment, so treating Riley as if she’s dared to say the unsayable and is being punished for it is just flatly wrong. Not only was she proud of her unprofessional ignorance, she was in some sense hackneyed. If you really feel it’s important to criticize Black Studies (or any other “Studies”) with whatever degree of sensitivity or care you believe necessary, you have a plenitude of existing writings to draw upon.
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Ragtime – You’ve posted several times that Riley’s initial blog entry was racist. This isn’t immediately obvious to me so perhaps you can explain why you consider it racist.
If the police catch 12 men red-handed robbing a bank together, and then let off the 8 white criminals by permitting them to plea bargain for their testimony against the 4 black criminals, and then prosecute the 4 black criminals to the full extent possible under the law, then the police are acting in a “racist” manner, even if the four men prosecuted are actually guilty.
Similarly, I have not read the dissertations in question, so they could all be awesome, or they could all suck. Even if they are all worthless, however, the act of ignoring thousands of dissertations with equally silly titles (for certain definitions of ‘silly’) to comment on a handful in Black Studies programs, is a racist decision.
“The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating the Black Vote? Just Review Their Criminal Records.”
“The Most Persuasive Case for Not Hiring Black Workers? Just Check Out Their Academic Transcripts.”
“The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations.”
The articles would then list the criminal records of John Smith from Baltimore, and the poor junior high grades of Mike Jones from Detroit (In sixth grade he got a C in penmanship! Is his race the type you want working at your company?).
Judging a group by the performance (real or imagined) of certain individuals in that group is pretty much the dictionary definition of “racism.” This didn’t seem like a close case.
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“Duke is surrounded by scary forests…”
It’s a really good thing you didn’t go to Sewanee.
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You know, Tim, I’m really thinking about Kevin Drum’s blog post. Putting aside the content of Riley’s blog post, I bet she was paid $50 by the Chronicle to write controversial content that would drum up readership. I bet they didn’t even bother to edit the content before it was published. I’m sorry, but if I was only being paid $50, I wouldn’t bother to spend three days reading some dissertations. It’s really the Chronicle’s fault for underpaying their writers.
Also, I do find it chilling for free speech that people are fired for saying controversial, even repugnant, ideas. I think that Drum is right that outsiders are looking at academics as a bunch of bullies.
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Certainly the Chronicle has its own faults here, but I still don’t see how it is wrong that she be fired for making very specific insults without any effort beyond looking at the title. “You all suck” is a common way to boost attention to a media outlet. “You, Ms. X, suck” is potential liable if you indicate that you have made to effort to see if the charge is true. Also, you can tell a shitty dissertation without the bother of reading the whole thing.
As for forests, I just don’t like those spindly pine trees in North Carolina. Something deciduous please.
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I’ve written for the Chronicle and I got a lot more than 50 bucks. Where are you getting your information?
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Just speculating based on writing stuff for other venues. Blog posts, not fully fleshed out articles, get little $$$.
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I’m sorry, but if I was only being paid $50, I wouldn’t bother to spend three days reading some dissertations. It’s really the Chronicle’s fault for underpaying their writers.
I agree, I wouldn’t have read them for $50 either, but then I also wouldn’t have written a blog post in which I dissed the dissertations. If you are not being paid enough to do the job, then don’t do the job — don’t just do it badly.
But, I also think Kevin Drum is missing the point:
There should be a lot of room for ill-considered opinions in blog posts. What’s more, I think Gillespie is right: if Riley had written the exact same blog post about, say, Classics or Film & Media Studies, she’d still be working at the Chronicle.
Not to beat a dead horse, but Classics and Media Studies are not majors peopled almost entirely by black students studying black-themed texts.
It’s as if there is no difference between arguing: “We should never have extended the vote to women, because they are not mentally developed enough to exercise it properly,” and arguing: “We should not now extend the vote to 16-year-olds, because they are not mentally developed enough to exercise it properly” because they are formally the same type of argument. The latter is fair game for debate — I should be fired if I tried to argue the former.
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“I’m sorry, but if I was only being paid $50, I wouldn’t bother to spend three days reading some dissertations. It’s really the Chronicle’s fault for underpaying their writers. ”
No, it’s really not. First, she didn’t have to write about the topic at all. Second, if she’s going to write about it she has to write logically. The bottom line is that you can’t judge a dissertation by its title, and being underpaid isn’t an excuse.
Oh, and adjuncts can’t judge papers by their titles, either, unless they make it clear to both their students and employers that that’s all their going to do for their pay grade, in which case the students/employers can decide whether they’re going to employ them.
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Which, after all, is what the Chronicle did.
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The Chronicle of Higher Education supports scholarship. Riley’s post dismissed scholarship as “claptrap”. Then Riley subsequently bragged about not having read the works she was dismissing.
This seems like a classic mismatch between institutional mission and employee. I, personally, would have put her on probation, but perhaps that isn’t fitting for an independent freelancer like a blogger?
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Laura makes an interesting point about how much Riley was paid. I wonder if there’s information about that out there.
But Laura, she wasn’t fired for being racist. She was fired for being an idiot then bragging about it.
Re Duke: It’s been 20-25 years since that time of my life, one I refer to as “The Therapy Years,” but I’ve spent much of those 20-25 years being irritated by misrepresentations of what was going on. Back then, Duke was neither a bastion of liberal orthodoxy, nor a department with a civilized balance of ideas. It was kind of chaotic and self-important and most of all diverse–not in terms of traditional identity categories, but in terms of ideas. That’s what no one ever realizes about Duke back then. There wasn’t one way you were supposed to think.
What Tim says about black studies could equally apply to most American Studies programs, like the one I graduated from as an undergrad. I graduated as one of 4 American Studies majors that year, but I never had a “Professor of American Studies.” I had English profs, and history profs, and anthropology profs, and political science profs, etc. (What I really wanted to do was cultural studies, but I didn’t know what that was yet, and we hadn’t given it that name yet, plus most of the good stuff in cultural studies was British–American Studies was the closest I could get to what I was really interested in.)
That said, I found Scott McLemee’s article on the topic interesing:
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/05/09/putting-black-studies-debate-perspective-essay
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In the blog-focused world (vs. academia) it’s not that uncommon for people to share their opinions based on titles or short descriptions of things, as long as they don’t pass it off as those they have actually read X.
So from the outside looking in I find that part of the argument kind of odd. It might invalidate her broader point, but I think she was clear about the bias she was bringing to the piece – she was judging just on the titles. I think she was insensitive to her audience: People who read the whole thing, generally.
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Sorry, Laura, not buying it. A relatively low level of pay does not excuse the sloppiness and stupidity of the initial post. The double-down defense in the second post is definitely don’t-let-the-door-hit-your-ass-on-the-way-out material.
Riley writes, “My qualifications to post on this blog consist of the fact that I have been a journalist writing about higher education for close to 15 years now.” But 15 years of experience have not taught her that reading titles is not enough? WTF?
If there’s any blame for the Chronicle here, it’s not having an editor who looks at blog pieces and who would have the power to tell the writers “WTF?” On the other hand, it’s entirely reasonable to expect someone with the aforementioned 15 years of experience to know that reading dissertation titles is not enough. Someone who’s been around that long should have an internal editor that goes WTF to ill-advised post ideas like that one.
So it looks to me like Riley just didn’t care. About the Chronicle, about her readers, about standards. And that’s another reason to part ways. Plenty of people care enough to bring their A game to the Chronicle.
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Ragtime – I accept that explanation.
I have had several encounters with legal scholarship in the last couple of months that left me astounded anyone would be rewarded to write and think about such piffle. One of my reactions to Riley’s article was to wonder why she hadn’t targetted Law schools, which are worse offenders both in terms of deceiving their students and producing utterly irrelevant, mind-numbing research.
That said, I thought actually mounting a petition to have Riley fired was whiny and exaggerated. I think the whole episode reflects badly on both sides: one who wrote a shoddy, ill-tempered blog post, and another which seems to be aching to be provoked into a witchhunt.
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“another which seems to be aching to be provoked into a witchhunt.”
Who is aching to be provoked into a witchhunt? What do you even mean by “witchhunt”? Are you saying someone is going to investigate the possible racism of every writer on the Chronicle staff? Is anyone planning to closely read every single blog post on the Chronicle website for signs of incipient racism?
The way I see it, the system in place worked. Someone wrote something for a pub; the audience for the pub found it lacking and said so, and the pub fired the writer. Sounds like the free market to me.
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Wendy – Responding to some blog post which one finds offensive by launching a petition drive condemning the post strikes me as a massive overreaction and indicative of a group of people looking for a greivance. We’re talking about a blog post here.
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I think it’s also important to point out the people who study things like race and gender are often looked down upon by some in the “mainstream” of their discipline (mine is political science too). I know I was told by my undergrad advisor (who studied gender and was denied tenure at her first job) to not study gender until I had a job. Otherwise, I’d be pigeonholing myself. N of 1 I understand, but when I read that bottom feeding grad student site, I understand why people studying issues of race and gender might be more comfortable in black and women’s studies departments as opposed to political science departments.
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1. I think Drum is wrong, wrong, wrong, more wrong than I’ve seen him in a long time, and he’s wrong in a way that strikes me as annoyingly pre-determined and about standing up for fellow “bloggers” (which apparently doesn’t include folks like me who’ve been blogging for ages). I think if Riley had written the EXACT SAME THING about evolutionary psychology or media studies–that she thought everything those fields had to offer was garbage, that she felt they should be eliminated from academia, and that current *named* graduate students were writing crap, and had then said, “I refuse to read anything in those fields, including anything more about these dissertations” AND she was blogging for CHE, she’d have been canned. That is a kind of attack than almost no academic could shrug off even if it was on a field they had little regard for, not if it was in a publication that they thought mattered.
2. Ethics aren’t sold on a sliding scale with your payment. I do my goddamn homework if I’m going to have a strong opinion about something. I’m working through a book right now that I intend to critique on my blog and I don’t get paid anything for my blog. No ad revenue, no nothing. Right, I know, I have a tenure. Well, check out how many of my tenured colleagues have 10-year old blogs with essays on the side about writing, grad school and so on. At my own college, there’s two that I know of, none of them as long-standing and none with remotely as much material. I don’t have to do this. I do it because it matters, in my view. Because I think this is what tenure and academia is for, in part. Because it matters, I try to do it right. When I get it wrong, as I have on occasion, I try to say so. I don’t adjust any of that depending on how much coin is in my pocket as a result.
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jult:
I didn’t mount a petition for anything myself, nor did I sign one. I said: this is not what I want to read in a publication that I think matters. And I said: I think they’re wrong if they think the attention this kind of post gets is worth it. And I said: I don’t think I’ll be reading this much in the future.
As Wendy said: the free market at work. That’s it. If CHE looks at that and says, “Ok, this wasn’t a good idea”, that’s their call. Or heavens forbid, if the editors felt (as they said they felt) that this was a really spectacularly bad piece of writing that defied some minimal expectations that they themselves felt were important, then it is their prerogative to cancel their contract with the writer. It’s a pretty basic part of publishing.
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OK. Well, Drum’s post did make me rethink my position a bit. And that’s a good thing. Even if he was wrong, he made me think about things. I like reading things that are wrong. JS Mill and all. Wrong ideas make my arguments better.
For me, the inexcusable part of that post was that she named grad students, which strikes me as cruel. Otherwise, I don’t think her post was any more or less lazy than most other blog posts written by amateurs or sponsored by a major newspaper. I think there should be a place for random ideas, even bad random ideas, on the Internet.
re: political science and gender/race issues. Yeah, Shannon. Too much to say on that matter and too insider-y for this blog.
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“Well, Drum’s post did make me rethink my position a bit. And that’s a good thing. Even if he was wrong, he made me think about things.”
Exactly. Because you are at heart a scholar/thinker and that’s what scholar/thinkers do: they look at both sides and consider the arguments and you do it because there’s something important at stake: knowledge and understanding.
And Riley was the exact opposite.
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“the inexcusable part of that post was that she named grad students, which strikes me as cruel”
I totally agree with this. And I actually read some more and decided that I was probably somewhat wrong in lumping this particular piece in with a more, I guess, lighthearted approach to things like “reading these titles, boy, I’m not sure I can get behind them.” Which is what I came back to say. 🙂 So clearly the discussion out of this is kind of awesome.
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Timothy – I don’t disagree with you about the initial post. I thought the whole thing was embarrassing for Riley. But it’s a blog post. I’m not an academic and these sorts of stupid comments occur all the time outside of academia and people let them roll off, especially if they’re effectively rebutted like Riley’s initial post was. Firing someone over something like this is weird, as if readers of CHE don’t have the maturity or level of tolerance to reject something without reacting in the most extreme way.
Also, how do we all feel about the same unread dissertations being extolled in a news article (not a blog post) by the CHE? If it’s bad to criticize a dissertation without reading it, isn’t it also bad to praise a dissertation without reading it?
This is one of those situations in which if both parties (Riley & the petitioners) had acted in a more mature way, they would look a lot better.
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Oh, and let’s all quit it with the “free market” works this way comments. The word for this line of argument is tendentious. No one is disputing the Chronicle’s legal or business right to fire Riley. The discussion is about the ethics of their action.
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I hope the person who wrote the diss on childbirth in the Black community proves Riley wrong by getting a great job! I think a number of us had this same thought — stupid dissertation? Au contraire. I’d like to read that. It sounds really interesting —
I’m hoping that there’s a search committee member somewhere who thought the same thing. It would provide a nice bit of karmic justice.
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“Also, how do we all feel about the same unread dissertations being extolled in a news article (not a blog post) by the CHE?”
Which article? And can you give an example of any passages where the dissertations were being “extolled”?
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By the way, one of the directions higher ed is going in is to become more interdisciplinary. The new buzzword is “integrated learning.” Or is it “integrative learning”? (I have no patience for all this labelling stuff. I went off on someone in a meeting once because he got all excited about “assessments” and how awesome a new emphasis on “assessments” was going to be, and when I challenged him, it ends up he basically meant tests and papers and stuff like that. WTF? I’m the same way about “integrated/ive” learning. Oh, you mean interdisciplinary courses? Argh.)
There’s an interesting discussion to be had about the value of disciplines in academia vs. an emphasis on interdisciplinarity. <–Not a word?
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jult:
So what are you saying? That a publication is ethically bound to continue printing an author who wrote a crappy article? Actually, a crappy article and then an even crappier defense of the crappy article? Why? Because blogging is supposed to be crappy? That sort of seems to be Drum’s argument, too–that we shouldn’t expect much of bloggers, so once you hire one, just keep them on no matter what, because it’s impossible to be so crappy as a blogger that you’re no longer worth publishing?
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That a publication is ethically bound to continue printing an author who wrote a crappy article? Why?
That would explain so much if it were true.
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Maybe the publication should have done a better job editing the blog post before it was published.
Drum’s tweet to you about how the outside world views academics is important. Yes, you have the time, Tim, to write careful, thoughtful, balanced blog posts. That’s awesome and we all appreciate what you write. However, other writers make a living from writing and blogging. They pay their mortgage with the checks from these publications. If they are paid to produce quickly written, controversial content, that’s what they’ll do. Instead of merely firing Riley, I would have been happier if the Chronicle admitted that they had a hand in all this by not supporting writers who write careful, thoughtful blog posts. They should have said that in the future they would offer writers more editorial guidance and a sufficient salary to encourage time-consuming, well balanced attention to important topics.
I was surprised that so much bile from academics was aimed at Riley herself and not at the Chronicle. Other writers can easily see themselves in the same boat. When you write quickly, you make mistakes. People outside of academia don’t understand the vulnerability of grad students and instead see the vulnerability of writers. They think that academics are overly sensitive and intolerant of other points of view. They think the firing of Riley amounts to censorship .
I don’t think this way, but I’m just explaining what they are thinking, btw.
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My major point in my own piece about the controversy is that the problem is with the Chronicle’s choices about how to do digital publishing. There are many Rileys in the world, but there isn’t any need to pay them to write in a publication that’s about higher education. As Laura has pointed out many times, when various publications explain that “they couldn’t find any excellent women writers to publish” and similar arguments, they’re very obviously full of crap. Digital media have revealed that there are so very many great writers out there that choosing a non-great one, even for peanut-pay, is unnecessary. Plus CHE is one of those publications that should be choosing another road into creating a digital presence besides “publish dumb, provocative crap and get lots of attention”.
On the other hand, can we get real? Riley didn’t “publish quickly and make a mistake”. I keep pointing this out to no avail, but Riley’s M.O. in this article is just the latest version of a similar tactic used largely, but not exclusively, by cultural conservative activists–cherrypicking titles of academic courses or papers, saying that they’re self-evidently crap, and then refusing to actually engage the content of those courses or papers. This was not a thoughtless shoot-from-the-hip blog post by Riley: it was a paint-by-the-numbers bit of hackery that has a number of antecedents.
Academics *are* overly sensitive, sometimes to the point of intolerance of other points-of-view. But this isn’t one of those times: a publication about higher education saw fit to publish a aggressively bad and insulting piece that spat in the face of some of the most important values of higher education. I used to think that maybe those values were more broadly shared by decent folks in all professions in American society–that it is bad to self-righteously attack work that you haven’t actually read or watched and refuse to read or watch, to demand the firing of people you not only don’t know anything about but refuse to know anything more about other than you think they’re silly, and so on. Riley didn’t just criticize work on (for example) 19th Century black midwifery, she called for it not to exist. So someone who called for censoring an entire field of study that she defiantly refused to read, examine or engage isn’t a problem, but people who argue that she shouldn’t be published in that one publication are a problem? And they’re being overly sensitive because they called for that? I think that goes way beyond being a double standard right onto being a quadruple standard or something.
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“Digital media have revealed that there are so very many great writers out there that choosing a non-great one, even for peanut-pay, is unnecessary.”
The unfortunate truth is that those “great writers” usually produce on their own schedule (i.e. when they have something to say) and often take long breaks. Give any of them a perch on the NYT editorial page with a need to produce at an industrial pace, and within 3-5 years, their creative juices will be completely sucked out.
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Yes. Which is why the NY Times should have about ten times as many columnists and publish them all far less. Yes, at appropriately lower pay per columnist, which I know creates other issues with the sustainability of the model. (E.g., a columnist who is getting less pay per piece has an incentive to produce more pieces elsewhere, which leads quickly to the same exhaustion of creative energies.)
I’m real sure what we want on the content side: variety and quality. I’m equally certain that we’ve discovered that there are sufficient numbers and diversity of talented content-creators to provide variety and quality without compromising either. On the making-a-living side, things are much less certain. It might be that being a columnist-who-bloviates-on-news-shows isn’t a viable living any more. But that might not be so bad. Maybe the columnists also need to be working journalists producing other kinds of content, working writers who create other kinds of work, or working professionals who have a day job of some kind.
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“However, other writers make a living from writing and blogging.”
Still not buying it. A relatively low level of pay does not excuse the sloppiness and stupidity of the initial post. (Though I tend toward Tim’s explanation of hackery rather than mistakenness.)
Riley writes, “My qualifications to post on this blog consist of the fact that I have been a journalist writing about higher education for close to 15 years now.” But 15 years of experience have not taught her that reading titles is not enough? WTF?
If there’s any blame for the Chronicle here, it’s not having an editor who looks at blog pieces and who would have the power to tell the writers “WTF?” On the other hand, it’s entirely reasonable to expect someone with the aforementioned 15 years of experience to know that reading dissertation titles is not enough. Someone who’s been around that long should have an internal editor that goes WTF to ill-advised post ideas like that one.
So it looks to me like Riley just didn’t care. About the Chronicle, about her readers, about standards. And that’s another reason to part ways. Plenty of people care enough to bring their A game to the Chronicle.
PS to Amy: Three to five years is very close to the typical life span of a good freelance gig. The publication changes, the technology changes, the readership changes, the editorial side changes, the ownership changes, whatever. Like Rosanne Roseannadanna says, “It’s always somethin’.” But lifetime-like positions with a publication are very much the exception rather than the rule.
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“Which is why the NY Times should have about ten times as many columnists and publish them all far less.”
Right.
“E.g., a columnist who is getting less pay per piece has an incentive to produce more pieces elsewhere, which leads quickly to the same exhaustion of creative energies.”
Right. On the other hand, I think writing at different lengths and for different audiences may keep writers fresher longer than writing the same length for the same audience every blooming week.
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