Censorship Of The Left

http://www.academia.org/censorship-of-the-left/ ^ | May 16, 2012 | Malcolm A. Kline

[Academiadotorg]

A friend of Accuracy in Academia has been fired from her correspondent’s post at the Chronicle of Higher Education for daring to criticize the field of “Black Studies.”

“Seriously, folks, there are legitimate debates about the problems that plague the black community from high incarceration rates to low graduation rates to high out-of-wedlock birth rates,” Naomi Schaefer Riley wrote on the Chronicle blog. “But it’s clear that they’re not happening in black-studies departments.”

Specifically, she took issue with a quintet of these profiled in the Chronicle. “ If these young scholars are the future of the discipline, I think they can just as well leave their calendars at 1963 and let some legitimate scholars find solutions to the problems of blacks in America,” she wrote.

We found them lacking in substance as well, at best. Moreover, at least one of them bordered on thought control. La TaSha B. Levy, 33, a Ph. D. candidate at Northwestern, has decided to do her dissertation on “Strange Bedfellows: The Rise of the New (Black) Right in Post Civil Rights America.”

“During the early 2000s, Ms. Levy was working at the University of Virginia as the director of its black cultural center,” Stacey Patton reported in The Chronicle on April 20, 2012. “When she saw students reading books by Star Parker, Shelby Steele, and John McWhorter, she grew concerned that they were latching on to arguments that black culture was the only thing that held the race back, and affirmative action.”

The reaction to Ms. Riley’s critique was Left-Wing indignance writ large. “Her lone blog post brought a torrent of criticism, attacks by MSNBC, and finally a petition demanding that the Chronicle “dismiss” her,” John Fund reported on National Review Online. “It was signed by 6,500 professors and graduate students.”