The Hypocrisy of National Review Online: The Cases of Naomi Riley and John Derbyshire
She was fired for having the courage to state the obvious.
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.’ One dissertation dealt with the failure of the natural-childbirth literature to include the experiences of non-white women, another blamed the housing crisis on institutional racism, and still another attacked Thomas Sowell and Clarence Thomas for leading an ‘assault on the civil-rights legacy that benefited them.’
Fund goes on to condemn the Chronicle of Higher Education for firing Riley.
Oh, the irony. As if the NRO didn’t just fire someone (Derbyshire) last month for being politically incorrect! This wasn’t lost on one commenter over there, btw:
Cloudbuster 05/12/12 07:19
Recently John Derbyshire, now Naomi Riley. Maybe Holder was right: we are cowards about race. I doubt he meant it in the same way I do.
Now, Cloudbuster obviously misses Derb, but the point remains that the parallel is there. Other commenters at NRO appear to be shying away from the obvious.
Here is Naomi Schaefer Riley’s blog entry that raised such a dust-up:
- in which she dismissively brushes aside a handful of dissertations without reading them.
Reading Riley’s blog entry it strikes me indeed as the classic right-wing sneering over Black Studies. It’s something one would expect to find on any Murdock outlet - and guess what, she does write for the WSJ.
Should the Chronicle have let her go? I don’t know, but they are a private entity and it seems to me if the National Review can let Derbyshire go because he finally, after many years of writing racist material, became too politically incorrect for them then why does the NRO criticize the Chronicle for letting go of someone who is writing pieces too controversial for the Chronicle’s website?