Academic rigor, journalistic ethics, and “partisan hackery”

[UPDATE: I’ve made a lot of changes below. Most are typos. Some are in response to critics of my own integrity. I’ve tried to deal with all of them . Let me know if there are other errors or changes that need to be made.]

It’s been a while since I allowed myself to get righteously indignant enough about someone wrong on the Internet to write a 708-word Facebook comment, and that was just the longest one. And now a whole blog post! But Naomi Schaefer Riley, who is a blogger for The Chronicle of Higher Education‘s website, wrote two blog posts — “The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations” and its follow-up “Black Studies, Part 2: A Response to Critics — that are, yes, such egregious displays of arrogance and incompetence that they deserve a good screed in response. However, more importantly (and more professionally, since this new blog is meant to be less screedy than the old one), they can serve as a teaching moment. Continue…