Paul Greenberg: Ignorance Rules

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette opinion editor Paul Greenberg is frequently on the warpath against science and academia. That he attacks Black Studies – the academic discipline studying African-American culture and history – in a recent column (also available here) is hardly noteworthy but his transparently dishonesty is at least worth documenting. Here is what happened.

Naomi Schaefer Riley, a blogger at the Chronicle of Higher Education, a trade journal rather obscure to most of Greenberg’s readers, published an attack on Black Studies titled “The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations“. In the blog post, Riley refers to three recent dissertations by Black Studies scholars as examples of “left-wing victimization claptrap”: about “historical black midwifery”, “Black Housing and the Urban Crisis of the 1970s”, and “black Republicanism”.

Here’s the catch: Schaefer Riley never read any of the works she attacked. She didn’t even look at the table of contents. What she read and partially quoted were the titles and blurbs. Notice the title of her post: “Just Read the Dissertations”. She hadn’t read them and for that reason she was heavily and deservedly criticized (read the response by grad students). She also fails to provide full references or links to the works she attacks, thereby deriving readers of the chance to judge for themselves.

Here’s how Paul Greenberg reports the issue to his Arkansas readers:

When one of the Chronicle’s bloggers criticized the current state of Black Studies on campus, she set off a mass protest. At last count, some 6,500 academics had signed a solemn petition demanding that Naomi Schaefer Riley, the blogger in question, be fired. And fired she was. (…) The Chronicle’s editor-in-chief — yes, it actually has an editor, or at least someone styled as such — claimed the blogger was fired not because her opinions were unacceptable but because, in the course of presenting them, she’d cited some of the sillier dissertation titles in the field she was criticizing. Said editor-in-chief didn’t claim the thesis titles were inaccurate. Her sin seems to have been that she’d mentioned them. And when she did, the response from those running the Chronicle was simple. Shut up, they explained.

Naomi Schaefer Riley is scarcely the first observer to note the academic crimes committed in the name of Black Studies. N.B. She wasn’t asserting that the history of black Americans (not to mention the literature, religion and, good Lord, the music of Black America!) isn’t worth teaching. On the contrary, she was demanding that it be taught well.

There’s barely a shred of truth in Greenberg’s rant. Riley wasn’t criticized for “mentioning” thesis titles but for attacking scholars without having read – indeed without having the slightest clue about – their work. Neither is it true that she only demanded the history of black Americans to be “taught well” – her very title calls for “Eliminating Black Studies”. It is interesting to note that Greenberg in his own column doesn’t even quote any of the dissertation titles. If they were so obviously silly, why not entertain his readers? The answer is obvious – these topics are actually quite unoffensive. Black midwifery? Black republicanism? Black housing? Sounds just like the sort of subjects that Black Studies scholars would be studying. If these are the best examples of “academic crimes” the critics of Black Studies can come up with, they better shut up.

Are these studies good scholarship? You’d have to read them to tell. That anybody, especially somebody like Greenberg who wants to be taken seriously as a conservative writer, would insist that you can judge a specialized scholarly publication by its title seems hard to believe but it’s actually standard operating procedure in the right-wing campaign against science (e.g. Greenberg’s attack on the NSF). Remarkable in this case is the level of blatant dishonesty exhibited by Greenberg, in addition to ignorance and know-nothingness.

The Chronicle finally stated: 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.

Does the Democrat-Gazette have any basic editorial standards for reporting and fairness in opinion articles? The answer is, of course, no. Greenberg did not violate any editorial standards because his opinion page doesn’t have any. He was only caught shamelessly lying.

Paul Greenberg’s war on science and learning

The Arkansas Democrat Gazette dedicated today’s editorial  (free registration required) under the headline “What’s Crazy” to another attack on science as tiresome as it is unoriginal. It’s not hard to guess that it is another of editorial page editor Paul Greenberg’s attempts at showing off his ignorance in all matters academic. The editorial is dedicated to Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn’s yearly rant against the National Science Foundation (NSF). Every year or so, Coburn releases a report picking NSF projects that he doesn’t think are worth funding. You know what, there’s a reason why scientific funding decisions at the NSF are left to competent scientific reviewers rather than politicians: the Coburn approach (putting politicians in charge of science) has already been tried – in the Soviet Union, for example – and didn’t work out so well.

The editorial is titled “Eat the shrimp, people”, and its primary showcase of alleged waste is so embarrassing one wants to cry. It concerns a study titled “Impaired Metabolism and Performance in Crustaceans Exposed to Bacteria”, awarded to Karen Burnett at College of Charleston.  The researchers study the metabolism and immune response of crustaceans under stress from hypoxia and bacterial infections. What’s wrong with that? Honestly, I don’t know and I bet neither do comrades Greenberg and Coburn. Greenberg certainly doesn’t waste column space explaining why exactly he opposes studying crustacean metabolism. Instead he explains that shrimp should rather be cooked in skillets than studied in labs, thus proving his half-wits to the half-wits who think that’s a funny joke.

What’s crazy? The Arkansas Democrat Gazette inoculating its readership with anti-scientific sentiment to make sure none of them will ever understand the physical world around them nor even the need to use the tools of science to better understand reality. As long as they can live in the fantasy world brought to them by Fox News and the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, no need to understand shrimp as long as you can cook them in butter.

What’s crazy? A senator bought and paid for by the oil industry, and the corporate media hacks at the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, crying foul about research spending they don’t like while supporting tax-payer subsidies for Big Oil to the tune of billions a year.

To read more:

Attacks on science and Coburn’s ignorance

Sen. Coburn and GMA attack Science and the NSF

How a shrimp on a treadmill became a Web sensation

Coburn’s NSF Idiocy

UPDATE:

Americans like to fret about the alleged under-performance of the public education system. Everybody’s favorite scapegoat these days are the teachers and their unions. Which makes sense until you think about it for two seconds: teachers have very little power in the system. They aren’t the ones who set education policy, they don’t get to write the curriculum, they have no power over funding levels and priorities, they don’t control how children spend most of their time. May I suggest that a large portion of the blame lies squarely with a political class and a punditocracy inoculating American culture with anti-intellectualism on a permanent basis.

Think about it. Today’s school children are being told day in day out that science and reason are worthless, that you can make up your own facts if you like, that evolution and climate science are just matters of opinion. The political and media discourse is to a large extent controlled by anti-intellectuals and science-haters like Coburn and Greenberg. What do we expect our school children to make of that? How would they develop an interest in learning and science in a culture that treats education as a handicap, learning as nerdiness, and disinterested research as government waste?