I have liberty on my own damn blog, but that’s because I own the place. I’m sure NSR can inject whatever she wants into the bloodstream of the polis from the comforts of her own damn blog, but she’s not entitled to someone else’s real estate.

(Besides, she was a paid blogger. That means it was contract work–and the Chronicle just decided not to renew her contract. Sucks to be an adjunct, doesn’t it, baby?)

When did the CHE become a university?

This is how conservatives define proslavery as not-conservative, anti-Civil Rights as not-conservative, etc. So I’m sure it’s only a short hop in their minds to imagine that very white and very conservative establishment of academia ca. 1950s-1980 were in fact all inclusive and open to the historical and intellectual study of black topics. The divisiveness was *caused* by all of those black radicals in their dashikis and afros, don’t you know.

Does none of these clowns remember that one of the demands of protests in 1968 was *exactly* the development of Black Studies departments, precisely because so few authors were considered canon, for literature, history, economics, that some facility had to be developed where scholars themselves could develop, in the schools of their homes instead of segregating themselves into the historically black college system?

It’s an achievement to be below a coat of paint in the use of intellect.

But yes, she’ll be even better paid soon.

Courtesy of this sort of thing: http://www.redstate.com/tooncesthecat/2012/05/09/censorship-alert-the-chronicle-of-higher-education-fires-a-conservative-blogger/

Although, I disagree that there isn’t a place to debate the existence of disciplines! I think we do all the time and should, especially in the UK, where the current management push is to amalgamate departments into faculties of humanities or social sciences. So you no longer work with a cohort of historians, but two historians, two Eng-lit peeps, 2 sociologists etc. This allows them to cut numbers of staff, by making degrees more generic or ‘interdisciplinary’. And the problem is ‘interdisciplinary’ is generally a good thing and there might be legitimate reasons why ‘departments’ or ‘subjects’ should be questioned as they constrain research by imposing certain artificial boundaries or standards around how we access the past. But this is a different type of conversation!

p.s. Check out Scott McLemee’s excellent commentary on this issue at IHE today.

Some of you may also want to read the comments, but be warned: many of them evoke an imaginary world in which History, English, Anthropology, Sociology, Lanugages, etc. departments were all busily and happily pursuing research on black people and the black American experience in particular up through the 1960s and 1970s, when all of a sudden the Black Scholar Mafia “segregated itself” from other academic disciplines and created their own black studies programs.

Yeah, that’s exactly how it happened. African Americans and their self-segregation, again!