I see some mainstream media outlets are catching up with the story I posted yesterday about the Chronicle of Higher Education and Naomi Schaefer Riley's piece encouraging people to read the dissertations from a Black Studies department.
Who knew that the most racist, hateful, venomous, hatey, hatey words in America were: read the dissertations.
What kind of a moronic society do we live in?
Here's another look at the situation from a professor in America. There are some great links in there.
OOOH!
Just spotted this: Naomi Schaefer Riley: The Academic Mob Rules
"If you want to know why almost all of the responses to my original post
consist of personal attacks on me, along with irrelevant mentions of Fox
News, The Wall Street Journal, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and George
Zimmerman, it is because black studies is a cause, not a course of
study. By doubting the academic worthiness of black studies, my critics
conclude, I am opposed to racial justice—and therefore a racist."
She further notes:
"As Ellen Schrecker, a Yeshiva University historian, writes in her book
"The Lost Soul of Higher Education," political ends were the goals of
the founders of black studies. Ms. Schrecker—who is, by the way,
sympathetic to these political goals—explains that the discipline's
proponents "viewed these programs as contributions to the continuing
struggle for racial justice, not as conventional academic courses of
study."
The same can be said for many other higher education "studies" departments. It is activism disguised as scholarship.
The lesson that we learn from this story, once again, is that if you have an unpopular opinion or "offensive", or "hurtful" opinion, you are expected to either shut up, or put up with a lot of collateral damage: professional, social particularly.
My choice is neither.
I have no plans to shut up or put up with it.
It's liberating, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
