A Sad Day

http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/the-most-persuasive-case-for-eliminating-black-studies-just-read-the-dissertations/46346

Naomi Riley was recently fired. She was fired as a blogger for the Chronicle of Higher Education for the blog posted above. More than 6000 academic wrote in to complain and to ask for her to be fired. They got their wish. This is a sad day in academia.
I have my own critiques of Black Studies programs. Some of them may overlap with Ms. Riley's critiques but many of them do not. But this is not the place to explore my concerns about such programs. I am sad because academics, the people who are suppose to deal with diverse ideas, decided that Ms. Riley's ideas was too painful and she had to be fired. It hurts me to hear academics cheer her firing. What are they afraid of? If her ideas are too weak then destroy them in the arena of ideas. Seeking to have someone fired because of their ideas is an unscholarly thing for a scholar to do.
I am nearly a free speech absolutist. But I have done research indicating that many academics are not as open-minded as they may believe themselves to be. They seek to shut down the speech they disagree with. They are hesitant to hire those with ideas that radically depart from their own. This episode reinforces my fears that social pressures and political desires drive much of academia then real thirst for knowledge and intellectual curiosity.
This year we will have a presidential election. We will be subject to a great deal of spin from both Republicans and Democrats. Both parties have viewpoints to push and are not really interested in finding the best solution, just the solution that makes them seem right and the other party seem wrong. That is politics and I guess that is the way it is to be in politics. In science we are suppose to be open to alternate ideas. We are suppose to investigate them even if we think them unwise at first. But we are not that way. If you do not conform to what we want to hear then we will seek your firing and if we can not do that then we will marginalize you in ways so that we do not have to debate you.
This reinforces my skepticism of things such as global warming. Once I see there is a political agenda attached to a scientific theory I begin to wonder if dissenters to that theory have been given a fair opportunity to present their view. Or have we merely fired them and shut them out of the conversation. Incidents like this reinforce the reasons why some people treat science just like they treat members of the opposition political party. And we academics who seek to get those fired who we disagree with have no one to blame but ourselves. This is a sad day for academia.

Sincerely,

Trouble-Maker