It is telling, or unfortunate, or something, that the title of Riley's article was "The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations."** Given that no one reads dissertations, in Black Studies or any other field, except your committee, it would be one heck of a stretch to believe that a contrarian blogger sat down with a big stack of 'em and confronted each with an open mind before reading the thing cover to cover. What Riley did - and indeed all she herself claims she did - was read a sidebar summarizing recent dissertations in that field. But if she's allowed to comment on the quality of dissertations she has only read about, it seems a touch unfair for her to come down hard on readers who imagined - no doubt from the title of the piece, which she maybe didn't write - that she ought to have read them.
The circular argument, outlined in her Chronicle self-defense, is that her very point about these dissertations, her very critique of academia, is... let's let the woman speak:
[T]there are not enough hours in the day or money in the world to get me to read a dissertation on historical black midwifery. In fact, I’d venture to say that fewer than 20 people in the whole world will read it. And the same holds true for the others that are mentioned in the piece.
Such is the state of academic research these days. The disciplines multiply. The publication topics become more and more irrelevant and partisan. No one reads them. And the people whom we expect to offer undergraduates a broad liberal-arts education (in return for billions of dollars from parents and taxpayers) never get trained to do so. Instead the ivory tower pushes them further and further into obscurity.
In other words, she knows these dissertations are obscure and unreadable because no one, herself included, reads them.
While lacking a PhD doesn't disqualify Riley from commenting on academia, it might help to explain why she appears not to know what getting one entails. Much - most! - of my program thus far has been about keeping me away from my good friends the nineteenth-century French Jews and their frenemies, nineteenth-century French non-Jews who wrote about Jews. Why? Because, teaching. Through coursework and exams, as well as the teaching we do while in grad school, we get prepped for the wide world of people who could not care less about our research topics.
So thus far I haven't addressed the elephants in the room: was the post/is Riley racist, and was it right for the Chronicle to fire her?
As to the first, the post was racist in the same way that anti-Israel critiques that fail to acknowledge equal or worse wrongs in other countries are anti-Semitic. While Riley herself may simply be a CCOA, one who'd be equally annoyed at Women's Studies, and no doubt some of her best friends are women, a free-standing piece about the pointlessness of Black Studies will of course come across as racist. Riley's self-defense here is basically a don't-you-know-who-I-am-and-everything-else-I've-ever-written-or-thought-on-this-and-related-topics. She must have understood that bashing just this one incarnation of Studies would lend itself to less-than-generous interpretations.
As to the second, Hamilton Nolan of Gawker may have said it best: "Riley may have been a victim of a mob. But the mob had a point." As Nolan points out - and I will only add that I see echoes of Walt-Mearsheimer-gate - the issue here is largely bad writing. Riley did not bravely take a controversial position on Black Studies departments. She took the CCOA shortcut of calling work she hasn't bothered to look into unworthy.
*Apologies to "Fawlty Towers."
** I see David Schraub got there first. Read his post as well. In her tepid defense, on this and this only, she perhaps didn't write the post title. But she ought to have read the post title, and thus understood where readers might have gotten the idea that her job was to read the dissertations she was declaring worthless.
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