John Fund in Censoring Naomi Riley comments on the latter's dismissal by the The Chronicle of Higher Education:
Earlier this week, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the trade paper for faculty members and administrators in universities, fired Naomi Schaefer Riley, a paid blogger for its website. Her crime? She had the courage to respond to a Chronicle story called “Black Studies: ‘Swaggering Into the Future,’” which stated that “young black-studies scholars . . . are less consumed than their predecessors with the need to validate the field or explain why they are pursuing doctorates in their discipline.” The article used five Ph.D. candidates as examples of those “rewriting the history of race.” Riley looked at the subject areas of the five proposed dissertations and concluded that they were “obscure at best . . . a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap at worst.”
John Fund goes on to make a number of obvious points in protest of the illiberalism of contemporary liberals.
But Fund neglects to comment on the irony of publishing his piece in National Review Online, which recently defenestrated John Derbyshire. (My posts on Derbyshire are in the Race category.) What makes it worse is that NRO is supposedly a conservative publication. We have a supposedly conservative publication publishing a piece that criticizes The Chronicle for dumping a blogger who bravely spoke her mind and expressed some unpleasant truths that many acknowledge but few have the courage to express. But this same publication did exactly the same thing to John Derbyshire. We expect craven acquiescence to race-baiters from politically correct liberals, but not from so-called conservatives such as Rich Lowry and Andrew McCarthy.
Why doesn't Fund stick up for Derbyshire? (Perhaps he has in some other venue.) I could be wrong, but Derbyshire is a more substantial commentator on the passing scene than the blogger Riley.
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