May 8 Update: The Chronicle has discontinued Naomi Schaefer Riley’s blog and distanced itself from Amy Lynn Alexander’s tweets. Details here.
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The Chronicle of Higher Education has taken a lot of heat this week for a fatuous, obnoxious takedown of the discipline of Black Studies posted by Chronicle blogger Naomi Schaefer Riley. Riffing off the sidebar to a separate Chronicle piece, Riley attacked in-process dissertations by young Black Studies scholars as axe-grinding, politicized, and irrelevant even as she admitted she hadn’t read a single word of any of them. (Perhaps strangest of all, she dismissed 1970s housing policy and black midwifery as subjects intrinsically unworthy of academic study.)
The Chronicle has posted an editor’s note about the controversial blogpost, but has mostly stayed quiet otherwise. Last night, however, a representative of the paper appeared on Twitter to respond to the Chronicle’s critics.
It got weird pretty quick.
Amy Lynn Alexander, “Editorial Promotions Manager” at the Chronicle, is new to Twitter. Her Chronicle account was created in March, and she’d only tweeted from it a few dozen times before this week. After a couple of tweets on the Riley piece on Wednesday, she entered the online discussion with gusto yesterday evening.
As Alexander waded into the fray she festooned her tweets with sarcastic asides, random capitalization, and textspeak. When folks expressed surprise at her lack of professionalism, she added awkward, self-justifying hashtags like #PR101, #MediaLiteracy, and #LanguageMaven to the mix.
It’s an embarrassment, frankly. In one representative exchange, Alexander twice accused grad student “TressieMC,” author of the first and strongest rebuttal to Riley’s piece, of “flaking” when Alexander tried to discuss the issue with her on the phone (“I made good faith effort 2 parlay & you umm Flaked” and “Evil Ol’ AA here extended 2 @tressiemcphd a civil, adult phone talk: her reply? “Sure,” w #. When @Chronicle_Amy rang? Flakery” were the quotes), then chided TressieMC for calling her on it: “careful: no one called you a flake. Pls back read.”
All in all, Alexander tweeted nearly fifty times last night, returning on two separate occasions after saying she was done for the evening. This morning has seen two dozen more tweets so far, many of them snarky replies to academics who’ve expressed dismay at her behavior.
It’ll be interesting to see how long it takes her employer to ask her to back away from the keyboard.
studentactivism.net 
9 comments
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May 4, 2012 at 11:40 am
Tad Suiter (@retius)
Even more than just black midwifery– she suggested that natural childbirth was intrinsically unworthy of study.
I don’t mean to imply that natural childbirth is in some way sacrosanct, but I do believe that any alternative medical practices should be investigated thoroughly by academics and medical professionals. Her feigned confusion and disbelief on that note seemed either especially disingenuous or especially ignorant.
May 4, 2012 at 12:51 pm
Tom
I’ll say it, because I’m anonymous and probably we’re all thinking it: this is a fairly standard example of racism as ignorance. It never occurred to them that black studies serves a purpose when compared to whatever it is that they take seriously; it never occurred to them that they would harm careers (at best, although that’s clearly not going to happen now because the community won’t allow it) and anger students and mentors by being dismissive and using names; and they’re shocked to think that we might interpret their mindless anger as evidence that they oppose the variety of experience that today’s academy allows. Because after all, it’s just black studies, why is everyone getting so upset?
Crap like this is why we need a new and better publication focused on the Chronicle’s market. They’ve been a sinecure magazine plugging along off institutional support for far too long.
May 4, 2012 at 4:59 pm
Steven Alexander
Inside Higher Ed:
http://insidehighered.com
May 5, 2012 at 12:12 am
CRACKERME_CRACKERMENOT
Racists are mentally diseased individuals. And they always prove it.
May 6, 2012 at 7:59 pm
Tons of Weekend Links « Gerry Canavan
[…] * Black Studies Hitpiece Leads to Chronicle of Higher Ed Twitter Trainwreck. Why Is the Chronicle of Higher Education Publishing A Racist Hack? Grad Students Respond to Riley Post on African-American Studies. The Inferiority of Blackness as a Subject. Anti-intellectualism, déjà vu. […]
May 7, 2012 at 8:56 am
What A Long Strange Trip It’s Been… « tressiemc
[…] debacle has incited more than rage, however. It has sparked discussions about professional ethics, media models, student organizing, and publishing alternatives. It has forced some corners of the profession to […]
May 8, 2012 at 12:36 am
Tweeting with CHE « zunguzungu
[…] of the first people to flag CHE’s blog post as indefensibly stupid-racist. Student Activist covered that exchange, which was truly ugly. The pretense of good faith would have been a little more effective if it […]
May 8, 2012 at 1:13 pm
Dit_ca
Tom, by your comment it appears that you don’t realize that Riley was responding to a very laudatory front-page article on black studies published by the Chronicle. Maybe you should look at the article and familiarize yourself with the reporter who wrote it. You are being as sloppy as Riley. Actually more so. She cited the piece.
May 9, 2012 at 4:59 pm
Barry
It’s clear that the editors of CHE make Riley look smart. Their initial defense was an incredibly fatuous claim of ‘debate’. If I were in charge of the CHE and wanted a high-quality journal, that editor would have been publicly fired in front of the rest.
(note: It’s clear by now that fatuous and dishonest is how the management of CHE *likes* their editors)