Censoring Naomi Riley

[Valin]

National Review:

 

She was fired for having the courage to state the obvious.

John Fund

5/12/12

 

Oslo— The Oslo Freedom Forum is an annual event sponsored by the New York–based Human Rights Foundation, which brings together dissidents and journalists from all over the world to show that people of good will can promote basic freedoms without an overlay of ideology.

 

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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.”

 

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Nick Cohen is an atheist and former leftist who writes for the Observer and Guardian newspapers in Britain. His most recent book, entitled “You Can’t Read This Book,” examines the new forms of censorship that are emerging in the 21st century. He warned those at the Oslo Freedom Forum that many in the West now “surround taboo subjects with a bodyguard of politically correct humbug. This form of self-censorship has had a profound effect on liberalism.” He noted that “censorship is at its most effective when no one admits that it exists. ‘No one else is complaining, so move along now,’ becomes the mantra.”

 

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