Naomi Riley blogging (on a team of bloggers) for The Chronicle on Higher Education has criticized dissertations written by students in the Black Studies department. She argued in bold words that the ideas kicked around in Black Studies dissertations were vapid, hunting for racism in every tiny microcosm of America culture. Many Chronicle readers were outraged. Riley responded in part by writing:
I find the idea that there is something particularly heinous in criticizing graduate students or dissertations to be laughable at best. Just because they are still called students doesn’t mean they’re not grown-ups. When someone in their 30s (me) criticizes the dissertation topic of someone in their 20s, that’s “bullying“?
Feel free to entertain yourself by reading the posts and comments, but to cut to the chase, Alan Jacobs lays it all out. In short, he explains how hard it must be for the Chronicle to hire a blogger for the sake of diverse, atypical thinking, and then have to fire her for diverse, atypical thinking. Gotta hate it.
The best response I’ve read, to my money, is here. The argument Tressiemic makes is twofold. First, that the Chronicle is one of the most visible and thus powerful publishing venues in academia, and untenured, unemployed graduate students at the beginning of their careers are at the lowest levels of power, perhaps, of academia. The issue isn’t ‘criticizing’ graduate students, it’s using an enormous megaphone to mock their work. It’s just unprofessional.
Second, and this is the bigger point to my money, Naomi Riley didn’t address the arguments made in the dissertations. It’s not even clear that she read them (I can’t believe she took the time — it sounds like she read the abstracts). She made emotional arguments based on the subjects of the dissertation, which is poor argumentation and poor writing.
To be fair, it was a brief opinion piece, and there are plenty of venues where it would have been appropriate (if still mean), but the Chronicle is not one of them.
Help me out. Are you saying no argument could be made for the worthlessness of an academic department? What I understand from Riley’s post is that Black Studies dept. are ridiculous as seen in the theses of these dissertations. I suppose it would be along the same line some professors take against theses in support of Intelligent Design of the universe.
Is this post part of blog debate where these dissertations were hailed for strong thinking and Riley responds to say they are ridiculous?
Not at all — an argument can certainly be made about the value of the scholarship, but one needs to read it and engage with it to do so. It’s not clear from the piece Riley wrote whether she read the dissertations or not, but her piece certainly doesn’t engage with the scholarship these students have done, it takes pot shots at their topics.
To borrow an example, Riley writes:
Did she even bother to look up “natural birth literature?” It’s a big movement, and a major issue for birth care providers everywhere because the ‘home birth’ movement has been gaining significant sway in the public conversation about birth practice in the U.S. That community’s language about birth is totalizing, but circulates almost entirely among upper and middle class white women. So yes, anytime a community has significant sway in policy and conversation but includes almost no minority voices, it’s worth studying, for my money. But to Riley, who freely admits she doesn’t know the context in which the paper is being written, it’s stupid. This isn’t critical commentary, it’s proud ignorance parading as common sense.
To argue something is worthless, you need to assess it first.
To follow your analogy, anyone (professor or no) who responds to a claim of intelligent design with “That’s ridiculous!” as the entirely of the response is being equally vapid.
I’m still irritated that she was let go for this post, and that’s what Alan Jacobs comments on in the article to which I linked, but I agree with you here, and you picked the example I disliked the most. A dissertation on black midwifery makes total sense to me, and I’m surprised to hear that natural birth books, articles, etc. don’t already include minorities of all kinds. Maybe the minority women (which is a label that always sounds awkward to me) who choose natural childbirth simply are not writing about it. I’m tempted to ask a couple bloggers I know.
Perhaps Riley was being completely reactionary. I wonder how much gut-reaction of the same quality is passed over by us because we agree with it.
I agree with you that the firing may have been too steep — but it depends how she reacted to the criticism of her position. If she maintains she was right to do what she did and the editorial board thinks she was wrong, then asking her not to participate in the publication any more seems reasonable to me. That’s what editorial boards are for.
As for the second part — I would say it happens all the time. Part of the reason I read this blog is because it’s a rare place where I disagree almost completely on political issues, yet feel the authors welcome civil discussion and disagreement.
So thanks for that, by the way.
You’re welcome. You’re a great guy, and I’m glad we can interact like this.