Brainstorm readers: We’re excited to call your attention to The Conversation, The Chronicle’s new home for opinion and ideas online. Building on Brainstorm and Innovations, it includes many of the regular contributors you have seen over the years and offers new ones as well.

Please follow us there. We hope to enlighten and entertain, and we also hope to hear from you. Feel free to reach us at onlineopinion@chronicle.com.

When we published Naomi Schaefer Riley’s blog posting on Brainstorm last week (“The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations”), several thousand of you spoke out in outrage and disappointment that The Chronicle had published an article that did not conform to the journalistic standards and civil tone that you expect from us.

We’ve heard you, and we have taken to heart what you said.

We now agree that Ms. Riley’s blog posting did not meet The Chronicle’s basic editorial standards for reporting and fairness in opinion articles. As a result, we have asked Ms. Riley to leave the Brainstorm blog.

Since Brainstorm was created five years ago, we have sought out bloggers representing a range of intellectual and political views, and we have allowed them broad freedom in topics and approach.  As part of that freedom, Brainstorm writers were able to …

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(Updated 5/11/12 at 1:57 p.m.) NB: To see Chronicle editors’ final response to the post mentioned in the note below, please read “A Note to Readers.”

Editor’s Note:

When we created the Brainstorm blog five years ago, we hoped it would be a forum for debate — where views about higher education, academic culture, and ideas could be aired and discussed and often challenged. It is a blog for opinion, sometimes strong opinions, not news reporting by the staff. The writers on the blog—13 in all, from institutions around the country—fall on different points of the ideological and political spectrum. They are not staff members of The Chronicle nor do they represent the views of the staff or of the newspaper.

Many of you have asked The Chronicle to take down Naomi Schaefer Riley’s recent posting, “The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the…

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