“A Cause, Not a Discipline”

In a restaurant-quality display of gutlessness, the Chronicle of Higher Ed gave the boot to a contributor to its Brainstorm blog, one Naomi Schaefer Riley, for having dared to say that the emperor (in this case, African-American/Black Studies) has no clothes. For example, Ms. Riley, who was responding to a CHE article on the field’s “Swaggering Into the Future” (a term one is unlikely to find used about, say, entomology), called out three dissertations mentioned in the article as examples of rot, hooey, and both balder and dash.

The dissertators had what my grandmother would have called a “conniption fit”, as did hundreds of readers, as did at least one commentator at MSNBC, who invoked Trayvon Martin in a fit of cataleptic non sequitur. The initial reaction from the Chronicle‘s editor was that Riley’s post could be taken as an invitation to debate — you know, the sort of argument over ideas that we’re supposed to value in higher ed. However, within a couple of days, Chronicle editor Liz McMillen folded like a gas station map, deleting the offending post and chucking Riley under the bus. (Riley offers her perspective — from which comes this post’s title — in the WSJ.)

This was, of course, McMillen’s prerogative as editor. That doesn’t make it any less cowardly, or any less inimical to the spirit of inquiry and discussion we claim to foster in our field.

Meanwhile, in a different section of higher ed, the U of North Carolina’s flagship campus at Chapel Hill has recently concluded an investigation into what one might honestly describe as academic fraud involving (among others) a significant percentage of the school’s athletes. Via Margaret Soltan, we learn that certain classes (with nearly 40% football and basketball enrollment, as compared to the fact that fewer than 5% of the student body are varsity athletes) seemed to assign high grades willy-nilly, and that in some classes, “there was little evidence that the instructor did much if any teaching.”

So, if you have marginal students who need to stay eligible, why not shunt them into content-free classes, preferably in a field with low-to-nonexistent standards just to make sure the grades stay up? But where can one find such classes?

The classes were all within UNC’s Department of African and Afro-American studies. An internal probe released Friday produced evidence of unauthorized grade changes and little or no instruction by professors. Forty-five of the classes listed the department’s chairman, Julius Nyang’oro, as the professor.

This story, by the way, received a two-paragraph post at the Chronicle.

Now, it’s probably not fair to argue that the goings-on at UNC are proof of the substance of Riley’s post. However, along with the stories of folks like Mary Lefkowitz and Leonard Jeffries, and with the news that Cornel West is leaving Princeton to “express his ‘own, prophetic Christian identity'”, one might wonder just how cool that breeze is against the emperor’s bare flanks.