Censoring Naomi Riley - John Fund - National Review Online
Oslo— The Oslo Freedom Forum is an annual event sponsored by the New York–based Human Rights Foundation, which brings together dissidents and journalists from all over the world to show that people of good will can promote basic freedoms without an overlay of ideology.
Censorship, both official and self-imposed, is an important theme here. We have heard stories from brave journalists such as Ecuador’s Nicolas Perez and Kosovo’s Jeta Xharra of efforts to silence them for expressing views unpopular with officials or special interests. So it was strange to be here and read that one of my friends and former journalistic colleagues back home in the U.S. has been fired merely for speaking her mind.Earlier this week, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the trade paper for faculty members and administrators in universities, fired Naomi Schaefer Riley, a paid blogger for its website. Her crime? She had the courage to respond to a Chronicle story called “Black Studies: ‘Swaggering Into the Future,’” which stated that “young black-studies scholars . . . are less consumed than their predecessors with the need to validate the field or explain why they are pursuing doctorates in their discipline.” The article used five Ph.D. candidates as examples of those “rewriting the history of race.” Riley looked at the subject areas of the five proposed dissertations and concluded that they were “obscure at best . . . a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap at worst.” One dissertation dealt with the failure of the natural-childbirth literature to include the experiences of non-white women, another blamed the housing crisis on institutional racism, and still another attacked Thomas Sowell and Clarence Thomas for leading an “assault on the civil-rights legacy that benefited them.”
Many academics I know agree that black-studies programs are often slipshod, academically non-rigorous, and repositories for “grievance” politics. But they won’t say so publicly, for fear of being branded as “racists.”
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