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Leftism Comes First As Black Studies Critic Is Fired  
May 11, 2012 

Free Speech: A news source for college professors fires a noted writer for racism after she exposes “left-wing victimization claptrap” masquerading as scholarship. So much for free academic inquiry. 

What was the offense that garnered 6,500 names on a Web petition calling for Naomi Schaefer Riley to be silenced in a favorite news site of America’s comfy, tenured, leftist-dominated academic elites? 

The former Wall Street Journal editor specializing in higher education, religion and culture dared to write a blog post for the Chronicle of Higher Education titled “The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations.” 

Riley considers it idiotic that people are awarded Ph.D.s for spending years researching topics like “Black Women’s Authoritative Knowledge on Childbirth,” imaginary federal conspiracies to place blacks in single-family homes during the 1960s and how black conservative intellectuals such as John McWhorter, Thomas Sowell and Clarence Thomas “assault” civil rights. 

Her post’s devastating crescendo highlighted real black social problems, “from high incarceration rates to low graduation rates to high out-of-wedlock birth rates,” lamenting that debates on such issues are “not happening in black-studies departments.” 

She suggested we “let some legitimate scholars find solutions to the problems of blacks in America. Solutions that don’t begin and end with blame the white man.” 

Racist? This serious voice of reason and genuine concern is a white woman who happens to be married to a black man, Wall Street Journal writer Jason Riley. 

Let’s not beat around the bush about what the Chronicle of Higher Education did in giving in to a mob of petitioners, which was organized by entrenched leftist academic interests. This is the same kind of high-tech lynching that was tried against Clarence Thomas two decades ago during his Senate confirmation hearings. 

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The goal then was to keep a black conservative out of power, so the illusion of big government helping blacks could continue unchallenged. The goal in silencing Riley is to gag someone of unique credibility whose well-informed opinion carries tremendous weight 

Then as now, the bullies of the left will lose — not least because their firing of Riley has backfired: Thanks to her firing, her astute thoughts on this boondoggle academic “discipline” have already in the last week been read by tens of thousands of people who would never be caught dead reading the Chronicle of Higher Education. 

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