I commend the Times for at least acknowledging the anniversary of Brown v. Board this week, but I take some issue with the conclusions opinion writer David L. Kirp makes. A quick conversation with the essay:

AMID the ceaseless and cacophonous debates about how to close the achievement gap, we’ve turned away from one tool that has been shown to work: school desegregation. That strategy, ushered in by the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, has been unceremoniously ushered out, an artifact in the museum of failed social experiments. The Supreme Court’s ruling that racially segregated schools were “inherently unequal” shook up the nation like no other decision of the 20th century. Civil rights advocates, who for years had been patiently laying the constitutional groundwork, cheered to the rafters, while segregationists mourned “Black Monday” and vowed “massive resistance.” But as the anniversary was observed this past week on May 17, it was hard not to notice that desegregation is effectively dead. In fact, we have been giving up on desegregation for a long time. In 1974, the Supreme Court rejected a metropolitan integration plan, leaving the increasingly black cities to fend for themselves.

A generation later, public schools that had been ordered to integrate in the 1960s and 1970s became segregated once again, this time with the blessing of a new generation of justices. And five years ago, a splintered court delivered the coup de grâce when it decreed that a school district couldn’t voluntarily opt for the most modest kind of integration — giving parents a choice of which school their children would attend and treating race as a tiebreaker in deciding which children would go to the most popular schools. In the perverse logic of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., this amounted to “discriminating among individual students based on race.” That’s bad history, which, as Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote in an impassioned dissent, “threaten[s] the promise of Brown.”

I take few issues with the summary of history. I did want to point out that we never really had an effective, longitudinal integration policy. Look at the years. A 1954 decision was effectively overturned by 1974. That’s 20 years. And it’s only part of the story. There were many state cases lost along the way that effectively gutted integration policies as the cases made their way to the Supreme Court. That means all this hullabaloo about Brown v Board is only ever talking about a good 10-15 years of actual policy. For context, we’ve spent more time debating what should replace the Twin Towers at Ground Zero after September 11th than we ever spent on true school integration in this country.

To the current reformers, integration is at best an irrelevance and at worst an excuse to shift attention away from shoddy teaching. But a spate of research says otherwise. The experience of an integrated education made all the difference in the lives of black children — and in the lives of their children as well. These economists’ studies consistently conclude that African-American students who attended integrated schools fared better academically than those left behind in segregated schools. They were more likely to graduate from high school and attend and graduate from college; and, the longer they spent attending integrated schools, the better they did. What’s more, the fear that white children would suffer, voiced by opponents of integration, proved groundless. Between 1970 and 1990, the black-white gap in educational attainment shrank — not because white youngsters did worse but because black youngsters did better.

Not only were they more successful in school, they were more successful in life as well. A 2011 study by the Berkeley public policy professor Rucker C. Johnson concludes that black youths who spent five years in desegregated schools have earned 25 percent more than those who never had that opportunity. Now in their 30s and 40s, they’re also healthier — the equivalent of being seven years younger.

Why? For these youngsters, the advent of integration transformed the experience of going to school. By itself, racial mixing didn’t do the trick, but it did mean that the fate of black and white students became intertwined. School systems that had spent a pittance on all-black schools were now obliged to invest considerably more on  African-American students’ education after the schools became integrated. Their classes were smaller and better equipped. They included children from better-off families, a factor that the landmark 1966 Equality of Educational Opportunity study had shown to make a significant difference in academic success. What’s more, their teachers and parents held them to higher expectations. That’s what shifted the arc of their lives.

I understand Kirp’s rhetorical position here: he’s talking to “today’s reformers” and maybe not me so much. I get that.

However, it is dangerous for any of us to package integration as a solution to education disparities if only because the reading comprehension of most readers is, well, reflective of our education disparities.

To be clear: adding white kids to schools and stirring to blend is NOT A SOLUTION.

The effects of integration on black/brown student outcomes is primarily a result of white people caring about a school once THEIR kids attend. The result is better funding, better teaching, better curriculum, better services that black/brown kids tangentially benefit from. Basically the effects of poverty on schooling is mediated by better investment once white kids show up.

It’s not integration that we need so much as we need anti-poverty solutions. And anti-poverty solutions are too often tied up in racial politics to be uniformly applied to schools so we also end up needing anti-racism solutions. All of that is absolutely possible to achieve without adding white kids. It’s that we’ve not found another way for white lawmakers and parents to CARE about poor black and brown kids except to have them sit next to their white kids that is the problem, not the solution.

I have said that fixing schools really isn’t all that hard. We know what works, for the most part: more resources, more time, more investment, equity, and access.

What’s hard is fixing the people that make decisions about schools.

And integration ain’t gonna solve that.

I had about as much intention of rehashing this as I ever have any intention of buying generic breakfast cereal. But unlike King Vitamin some things beg to be reconsidered.

After a rather unseemly lack of professional judgement led the Chronicle of Higher Education to defend Naomi Schaefer Riley’s attack on black studies, in general, and the dissertations of three doctoral students in particular, I started a little petition.

In said petition and the blog post that accompanied my reasons for starting it, I was always very clear about my critique. I did not then, nor do I now, care if NSR is racist. Her personal beliefs about race are irrelevant to me and to my criticism.

I always cared about the professional ethics of a publication who professes to represent higher education.

Doctoral students are referred to CHE when it is time to enter the job market.We’re told to comb the want ads — online and in print — for an idea of hiring trends. In many ways, CHE is the dominant personnel filtering mechanism in a field that has very few cohesive forces. Small or large, liberal or conservative, private or public — almost all colleges and universities refer to CHE as the dominant resource on hiring and employment in our professional sector.

So, belittling doctoral students in the pages of CHE, be they virtual or “real”, is not at all like attacking someone on the Letters to the Editor page of your hometown newspaper.

It is more akin to publishing your most recent employment review in your company’s newsletter.

Most companies don’t allow such things to happen. Most industry publications don’t allow such things to happen. They have good reasons. Seeing your employment review in your company newsletter or professional trade magazine elevates all of your manager’s concerns about you to a whole new level. His gripes about you taking smoke breaks since he stopped smoking or her issues with your refusal to wear pantyhose become more fixed, permanent, and potentially damaging when they are endorsed, however implicitly, by a publication that represents your employer.

I did not think the young scholars in question deserved such ungrounded, mean-spirited, poorly articulated attacks on their work.

In academia we’re accustomed to criticism. Part of our social capital is in soliciting such criticism by submitting our articles to journals where the entire point of peer review is to be critical.

But in peer review there are rules.

CHE, it appears, had no such rules of engagement.

So, I asked them — professionally and politely, if firmly — to reconsider their position on endorsing NSR.

In the interim CHE editors attacked my integrity within public online spaces.

Media outlets picked up NSR’s story and has, so far, refused the mantle of balanced reporting in not asking me or the doctoral students attacked or anyone else involved for comment.

All of that could have gone without discussion were it not for today’s reporting from Fishbowl DC. I’ll ignore the untrue assertion that I ever charged NSR with racism alone for now to focus on how NSR characterizes her relationship with CHE editors to Fishbowl:

http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowldc/pub-backs-blogger-in-emails-before-canning-her_b73020

It seems NSR is still miffed about her dismissal. So she’s released internal emails documenting the supportive advice she received from CHE editors during this process.

And, forgive me, but I’m more than a little miffed myself.

They clearly show an awareness of my critiques. In fact, the CHE editors direct NSR to my blog:

On May 2, 2012, at 11:44 PM, Alex Kafka wrote:

Hi, Naomi. Pls. see http://tressiemc.com/2012/05/02/the-inferiority-of-blackness-as-a-subject/ and google the Purdue petition etc. I guess I’d urge you, predictably enough, to write a calm, respectful, substantive response to some or all of this. I think we’ll also see if the dissertation authors want to respond in a guest post. Let’s touch base by phone tomorrow, if that’s OK. I’ll be working from home in the a.m., so if you have a few minutes, could you call my cell, BLANK? Thanks.

Best,
Alex

She responds with text she later cuts and pastes for her published rebuttal. In said text she willfully refuses to engage a single argument I put forth. Instead she chooses to characterize the thematic content of blog commenters as handy bullet points which, I can only surmise, are symbolic representations of rhetorical straw-men.

To: Alex Kafka
Subject: Re: Critiques of your post

Alex, I will give you a call in the morning. I am happy to hear you out on the subject but I am not sure that this disagreement is substantive at all. The comments seem to boil down to this:

• I am picking on people because they are black (and I am a racist)

• I am picking on people even though I don’t have a phd

• I am picking on people who are too young and inexperienced to defend themselves

• I am picking on people even though I haven’t read their entire dissertations

All I can say is that if these dissertations were all written by old white men I would still think they were irrelevant and unnecessarily partisan. I have not called people names. Over the years I have critiqued dozens of dissertation and other research topics by academics. There is a long list of disciplines that I would happily get rid of, as I’m sure you know.

And how do the CHE editors respond to her casual circumvention of the substantive debate they claim to want?

They sympathize with her arguments.

From: Alex Kafka
Date: May 3, 2012 12:03:10 AM EDT
To: Naomi Riley
Subject: RE: Critiques of your post

Points well taken. I think it’s that last one that might be bugging them the most. But yeah, let’s talk. Even if it were a post saying just what you do below, boiling things down, then responding, even tersely, to each point, that would at least indicate that you’ve heard them.

OK. Gotta sleep now. Just ate too much at a nice birthday dinner for my dad’s 91st (!). You can see some pix of it, him, and him and my mom here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/alexanderkafka/

We’ll talk tomorrow. G’night.

Best,
Alex

In the process CHE becomes a perfect case study for what I call the institutional logic of racism. It works, by the way, for hetereonormativity, CIS privilege, able-bodied privilege, etc.

It is an understanding that CHE is, before it is the paper of academe, an institutional actor in an institutional field undergoing serious structural change.

There are many ways to handle this kind of seismic organizational reconfiguration. There are entire fields of study devoted to those patterns of behavior. But few of them offer any discourse on the dark elephant in the room: when your institutional field operates within a raicalized social context, race will always be an issue.

NSR has said that the CHE knew exactly what they were getting when they hired her. I’m inclined to agree with her. It would be hard for them to not know her ideology or style of debate.

That they invited her to join their staff and not one of the many conservative thinker, writers, or public intellectuals who offer substantive debate on issues of race, class, education, and social history is indicative of an organization who made a choice about their response to the challenges it faces.

CHE chose to trade in the currency of racialized rhetoric. It’s cheap currency in the U.S. but its expensive as hell to spend.

And that’s what CHE learned when it chose poorly in its initial defense of NSR. It learned that there are still some dark, chaotic places that reasonable people don’t want to tread.

What the emails between CHE editors and NSR show is that the editors at CHE aren’t such reasonable people.

There’s a reason NSR felt so comfortable attacking private citizens from a powerful perch. There’s a reason that, despite her professed distaste for many other disciplines, she chose to respond to an article on black studies. There’s a reason that despite the article in question citing several tenured professors of black studies NSR chose to critique doctoral students. I’m even beginning to think that there’s a reason why, in her initial post, she apologizes for “being late” in responding to said article (was she always supposed to respond to it?). There’s a reason she double-downed and upped the snark and rancor in her follow-up post. CHE editors had her back. Until they didn’t.

And that leaves us here with the same questions I started this journey with. Is this who we are in academia? Is this how we engage people we disagree with? Are we so lacking in creative imaginings of alternative publishing models that we passively accept the grotesque flailing about of an organization that has nothing left to sell but cheap seats to  “Survivor: The Racist Season?”

I received my fair share of white power hate mail and a few scholars and colleagues no longer return my calls or emails. But for the most part almost everyone who reached out to me after I started the petition shared my concern about the coarseness and lack of civility in academic discourse. From across the ideological spectrum people thought we could do better.

I still do.

So, after telling the Chronicle that they should be ashamed of themselves and ignoring NSR altogether (kinda like how she ignores  both me and the substance of my criticism), I’m ready to talk about the real issues here. Let’s challenge power, not the pawns.

If you’d like to have a conversation about how scholars, administrators, and other invested parties can reimagine academic publishing models so that real currency and not cheap racist/sexist/CIS/ableist currency is being exchanged, drop me a line.

I’m thinking a tweet-up.

Or a G+ chat.

Or real actual face-to-face interaction.

But I’m definitely thinking there’s something better than the model and institutional logic the Chronicle of Higher Education is presenting us with.

If you’re thinking similarly consider asking your library why they still subscribe.

Consider asking your search committees to reconsider where they publish job ads.

Consider asking your colleagues who publish in CHE to think about that choice.

Or, do nothing at all.

But, forgive me if I go in another direction.

When I pulled off the highway during rush hour traffic to type out a response to Schaefer Riley’s attack on my iPad* I was being self-serving. I was serving MY indignation, my anger, my disappointment.

I hit publish and within an hour it became clear that I was not the only one indignant, angry, or disappointed.

Despite charges from a Chronicle editor, I had no thoughts of grandeur. If I had I would not have posted my response on a blog that, before last week, had an all-time visitor count high of 382. The HuffPo this blog ain’t. But I do believe that if you can’t speak truth to power because you don’t have the code to the gate you can, at least, speak into the void. And that was all I was trying to do.

And over 6,000 of you did not let me do it alone.

I am exceedingly grateful for that.

This morning, powered by that gratitude and the manic exhaustion that only the end of the semester can produce, I presented our petition to the editors of The Chronicle of Higher Education. I included a little note, speaking only for myself:

Mr. Semas,

I do not doubt that you know why I am writing so I will dispense with a summary of events. Instead I would like to tell you a brief story about how I came to be here, engaged with your publication, at this moment in time.

I read the Chronicle probably more regularly than the average graduate student not yet on the job market. A great deal of the data for my doctoral research is culled from your archives. I am familiar with the scope, depth, and breadth of your coverage. I have not always agreed with the editorial tone of everything you publish but I have always trusted that there was an editorial decision.

So, perhaps you can understand why I, somewhat naively, assumed that Naomi Schaefer Riley’s attack on black studies by way of personal attacks on Ruth Hayes, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, and La TaSha B. Levy was merely an editorial oversight. I thought that pointing out to you the extent of Schaefer Riley’s unprofessional, unproductive, and unprovoked personal attacks would warrant positive editorial action. I am rather ashamed that I was wrong.

I study institutions, Mr. Semas. I am well aware of the functional division between news production and editorial content, just as I’m sure you are aware that such a division is not practically relevant. The CHE masthead confers legitimacy whether the content be online or in print. It is an authoritative stamp that signals to readers – both lay and academic – that the content presented represents the acceptable form of academic discourse. To my knowledge, personal attacks and uninformed conjecture are not acceptable in such discourse. How, then, are they acceptable in the pages of a publication that bills itself as the “No. 1 source of news, information, and jobs for (emphasis mine) college and university faculty members and administrators”?

One of your editors stated that yours is a news organization and not an academic journal. The insinuation was that you are not beholden to academic norms. I never suggested you were the latter. But I do suggest that if you are the former and you are in service to the academic community, the ethical standards of that community should matter to you. They should matter if only because they matter to those who lend credibility to the Chronicle by reading, subscribing, and contributing.

I am such a person, Mr. Semas. So, I hope my opinion matters.

However, I’m taking a clue from Schaefer Riley’s disparagement of graduate students and your subsequent decision to defend her right to do so. I will not assume, as a graduate student myself, that my opinion alone matters much. Thus, I have attached a petition with 6,116 signatures. The petition calls for Schaefer Riley’s dismissal not because she is a conservative but because she is not in keeping with the ethics of the profession you serve.

You will forgive me for indulging in some cursory analysis of those signatures. Of the 6,116 cases 1,419 wrote qualitative responses. Of those 1,419 cases:

• 382 identified themselves as professors, administrators, and/or university affiliated.
• 58 noted that, at minimum, an apology is warranted.
• 282 used some iteration of the word shame.

I hope you will consider our collective request. Should, however, you decide that Schaefer Riley’s discourse is in keeping with the culture of your publication I ask only that you are transparent so those of us who care may act accordingly.

Best,

Tressie McMillan Cottom

I am writing this very quickly while on the side of Interstate 20. I am also struggling mightily to not use my colorful repertoire of insanely rhythmic and appropriate curse words. Thank me later.

Today The Chronicle of Higher Education published a blog entry from Naomi Schaefer Riley entitled “The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations.” I refuse to link. They do not deserve the traffic. Google it or take my word for it.

Schaefer Riley is responding to an earlier Chronicle article lauding the first cohort of Northwestern University’s Black Studies program. So bemused is she by the mere titles of the dissertations of these young black scholars that Schaefer Riley can barely contain her glee as she proceeds to viciously, intentionally, and deliberately insult every single one of the scholars listed and everyone within the field of black studies. You can almost hear her giggling as she writes:

“If ever there were a case for eliminating the discipline, the sidebar explaining some of the dissertations being offered by the best and the brightest of black-studies graduate students has made it. What a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap. The best that can be said of these topics is that they’re so irrelevant no one will ever look at them.”

What could be so utterly ridiculous of an academic topic to draw such ire from Schaefer Riley? For one, black midwives. I mean can you just imagine a critical examination of how black women give birth? How RIDICULOUS!

That’s what I would say about Ruth Hayes’ dissertation, “‘So I Could Be Easeful’: Black Women’s Authoritative Knowledge on Childbirth.” It began because she “noticed that nonwhite women’s experiences were largely absent from natural-birth literature, which led me to look into historical black midwifery.” How could we overlook the nonwhite experience in “natural birth literature,” whatever the heck that is? It’s scandalous and clearly a sign that racism is alive and well in America, not to mention academia.

Not only is black childbirth beneath her contempt but the very idea of literature about natural birth is also contemptible. It could be argued that is a particularly odd position in an age when public health schools are cropping up at every reputable university imaginable and scholars from across  disciplines are attempting to better understand the links between social realities and biological processes. Schaefer Riley will hear none of that! It’s liberal nonsense this whole idea that scholars might want to record the history and experiences of women having babies.

It’s not just childbirth that pisses Schaefer Riley off, though. So, too, does a critical analysis of housing, public policy, and race:

Then there is Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of “Race for Profit: Black Housing and the Urban Crisis of the 1970s.” Ms. Taylor believes there was apparently some kind of conspiracy in the federal government’s promotion of single family homes in black neighborhoods after the unrest of the 1960s. Single family homes! The audacity! But Ms. Taylor sees that her issue is still relevant today. (Not much of a surprise since the entirety of black studies today seems to rest on the premise that nothing much has changed in this country in the past half century when it comes to race. Shhhh. Don’t tell them about the black president!) She explains that “The subprime lending crisis, if it did nothing else, highlighted the profitability of racism in the housing market.” The subprime lending crisis was about the profitability of racism? Those millions of white people who went into foreclosure were just collateral damage, I guess.

This as our nation tries to recover from a protracted economic recession caused, in part, by persistent inequality in the housing market. Nope, not relevant. History happened THEN and this is NOW. And what happens to black people can in no way be generalized to any greater white human experience. You know, the only experience that matters.

Schaefer Riley goes on to deride, chide, and condescend to all of black studies through a personal attack on the scholarship of three young scholars who have the audacity to treat the black subject as a human subject worthy of interrogation.

The relevancy of black studies has never been so clearly proven as it is in Schaefer Riley’s gleeful attack.

But that’s not really what I want to talk about.

I want to talk about how Schaefer Riley constructed her argument.

She begins by responding to an innocuous article highlighting the work of doctoral students who just happen to be black and who just happen to be studying issues that impact black people.

Doctoral students.

That’s Schaefer Riley’s target: a group of accomplished, intelligent black doctoral students.

Schaefer Riley went after, arguably, the most powerless group of people in all of academe: doctoral students who lack the political cover of tenure, institutional support, or extensive professional networks. She attacked junior scholars who have done nothing but tried to fulfill the requirements of their degree program and who had the audacity to be recognized for doing so in academia’s largest publication. Their crime is not being fucking* invisible.

For that, for daring to be seen and heard Schaefer Riley eviscerates the hard work of  doctoral students.

And she does not even afford them the respect of critiquing their actual scholarship. That is beneath her. She attacks the very veracity of their right to choose what scholarship they will do. In effect, she attacks their right to be agents in their own academic careers.

She eschews their dissertation titles as laughable. She pokes fun at their subject matter. She all but calls them stupid.

And The Chronicle of Higher Education let her.

Maybe it has been awhile since you have been a graduate student. Maybe you have never been a black graduate student. Let me tell you a little about my experience of that.

You are almost always perceived as crazy and different for doing something few in your family or peer groups would ever consider doing. Even if you are among the best and brightest in college you are somewhat of an oddity in graduate school. You are either the voice of all black people or the voice of no one. You can be, in any combination and at any given moment: an affirmative action case, an overachiever, lazy, aggressive, scary, and your University’s poster child for diversity.

You are simultaneously invisible and in the spotlight…all the time. For five plus years. And you pay for the privilege because you care about the scholarship. You do the work. You jump through the hoops. You refine a research agenda, craft a research question that passes muster with your committee members, you spend countless hours reading, writing, collecting data, and learning your craft. Finally, it is time to present your baby to the world. And you do not expect to be coddled but you do expect that professional rules of conduct to which you have been taught to adhere will also apply to your colleagues.

You expect that completing almost all the requirements of your degree program will signal to the greater field that you, at minimum, should be respected as an intellectual peer.

You expect arguments to adhere, however symbolically, to the rules of logic.

You expect critiques to be confined to your ideas, not extended to your person.

You expect that when an academic publication promotes a scholar’s opinion that these very basic rules of engagement will apply.

If you are Ruth Hayes, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, and La TaSha B. Levy you awoke today to find that none of those rules apply when the scholarship is yours.

For that The Chronicle of Higher Education is as much to blame as Naomi Schaefer Riley.

These scholars did not deserve to be publicly attacked in the largest academic news publication for daring to be visible and black with a dissertation title that Schaefer Riley finds hilarious.

It isn’t scholarship when the entire purpose is to ridicule.

I know we’re not using the “r” word after Obama being elected and all but it really is this simple: by elevating Schaefer Riley’s racially tinged attack on three emerging scholars, The Chronicle is legitimizing open season on black scholars for doing black studies. That’s racist racism.

It does go to prove that black studies remain critical to academe but it also begs the question: with colleagues like The Chronicle and Naomi Schaefer Riley who in the hell needs enemies?

*fine, fine, fine: one cuss word slipped through. Sue me. Just don’t write about me in The Chronicle!

ETA: There’s now a petition because every time I think about it I get angry all over again. Public shaming and bullying is never OK. Please sign and share.