Category Archives: Wall Street Journal

May 21, 2012, 5:00 pm

Hoist by Her Own Petard?

As I mentioned in my last post on improving our comments policy, I had my say about Naomi Schaefer Riley’s work roughly a year ago (Giggling at Stereotypes). Over time I think most reasonable observers will agree that the issue with her work isn’t one flawed post, but a history of offenses against academic norms.

Together with shameless hit pieces like The Faculty Lounges, her assault on African-American Studies was not an exception, but a repetition, of serious blunders against both academic and journalistic values. I wouldn’t have hired her, and I’d have intervened in her efforts earlier. Her work was ideological first and foremost. As others have observed, the question isn’t why she was fired; it’s why she was hired.

Many of us in higher education get to our ideologies as a result of our research: we think “reality is broken” in some way, to use Jane McGonigal’s phrase, and we…

February 2, 2012, 6:45 pm

Would You Hire a Sad Person?

By Gina Barreca

(Photo by Jessica Tam at Flickr/CC)

Kelly Egger’s WSJ piece titled “Best Networking Tips” is precisely the kind of article I can imagine being dismissed by most readers of The Chronicle.

“It’s not like this in the academy,” they might say, if they were the types who say “academy.”

Or they might say, “This is exactly the kind of shallow, hyper-competitive neo-conservative capitalistic garbage that made me leave my well-paid position at UBS for film school at NYU,” although they might not say it quite that way to producers with whom they one day hope to collaborate–not unless they were really, really cute.

And while it’s true that graduate students looking for jobs might not have to take workshops on handshaking (“Weak handshakes turn people off, so practice yours with a friend to make sure it’s neither…

September 19, 2011, 8:50 pm

Wall Street Occupation, Day 3

By Marc Bousquet

Thousands gathered Saturday

a guest post by Zach Schwartz-Weinstein

Zuccotti Park in the Lower Manhattan financial district has been occupied by a politically diverse group for the last three days, with participation of up to several thousand at a time. Protesters have renamed the space “Liberty Park,” to brand it as an American counterpoint to Cairo’s Tahrir (“Liberation”) Square, and it has played host to general assemblies of thousands of people, hundreds of whom have slept in the park for the last two nights.

They hope to begin a sustained occupation to, in the words of two of the authors of the original call to action, “escalate the possibility of a full-fledged global uprising against business as usual.”

Taking cues not only from the so-called Arab Spring…

July 16, 2011, 8:39 pm

Follow-Up News of the World: A Little Close Reading

By Todd Gitlin

In his resignation statement on Friday, Wall Street Journal publisher, Dow Jones CEO, and 52-year (no typo) Rupert Murdoch employee Les Hinton, who before moving to New York was executive chairman of News International (which published the late News of the World), said:

When I left News International in December 2007, I believed that the rotten element at the News of the World had been eliminated; that important lessons had been learned; and that journalistic integrity was restored. My testimonies before the Culture Media and Sport Select Committee were given honestly. When I appeared before the Committee in March 2007, I expressed the belief that Clive Goodman [convicted of hacking into royal voicemail] had acted alone, but made clear our investigation was continuing. In September 2009, I told the Committee there had never been any evidence delivered to me that suggested the conduct…

May 25, 2011, 2:19 pm

What Tenure Gets You: A Reply to Naomi Schaefer Riley

By Gina Barreca

All right already. I’ve ignored your posts suggesting that college girls should walk around with T-shirts proclaiming “lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine.” I’ve overlooked your screeds defending evangelicals “who act the way they think Christ wants them to” (as if they alone got the memo).

But as we say in Brooklyn, enough is enough.

Tenure doesn’t get you, anything, Naomi. But people who believe education is a Good Thing? It gets us a lot.

Students, particularly the best ones, benefit from it. Maybe even you benefited from professors who had tenure when you were at Harvard, although it doesn’t sound like it.

Here’s what tenure “gets” those of us who regard education as a Good Thing:

1. Tenure protects teachers, scholars, and writers who might otherwise be judged exclusively by rich and powerful gimmick-driven parents, career-administrators, members of the…

January 17, 2011, 9:11 am

Reproducing Anxiety

By Laurie Essig

In the past couple of weeks, everyone and their mother is going on about two recent articles on parenting. The first, “Meet the Twiblings,” was a personal account by Melanie Thernstrom of reproduction as anxiety. The second, in the Wall Street Journal, was by Yale law professor Amy Chua on how “Chinese Mothers Are Superior” and is a study in reproducing anxiety.

Thernstrom, in her early forties at the time and married to a man five years younger, was

haunted by the thought that if we didn’t have children—even though he loved me and even though that love might blind him to the truth—in some sense marrying me would have turned out to be a mistake.

In other words, reproduction was necessary for her marriage to survive. And so she did what any other peri-menopausal but apparently quite wealthy woman would do. She found an egg donor, two surrogate mothers, took her husband’s sperm,…