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.