The CHE's Craven Blow Against Honest Speech
by Frederick M. Hess • May 9, 2012 at 9:02 am
Cross-posted from Education Week
Last week, the Chronicle of Higher Education blogger Naomi Schaefer Riley posted a tough, skewering (dare we say "mean-spirited") item blasting what she sees as a lack of academic rigor in black studies departments (hardly an earth-shattering observation, given that similar complaints have been made about all sorts of race and gender studies programs). For her trouble, on Monday she was fired from her gig as a paid columnist for the Chronicle. Given that the Chronicle is routinely filled with enthusiastic defenses of ethnic studies and casual attacks on "conservatives," you'd think they'd welcome the occasional touch of intellectual diversity. Turns out, not so much.
Riley's prose was hard-hitting but certainly no more so than so many of the jeremiads I've read in CHE and other K-12 and higher ed outlets about idiotic conservative policymakers, heteronormative bigots, and all the
