Following up on our item yesterday about the Chronicle of Higher Education’s purge of Naomi Riley, we decided to follow Chronicle editor Liz McMillen on Twitter. Imagine our shock to read this tweet: “Did you know? 33,655 PhD’s are on food stamps, more than triple the number three years ago http://chroni.cl/KOltmZ.”
She sounds like Newt Gingrich! Everyone knows “food stamps” is racial code. And when we clicked through to the link, we found that the Chronicle story opens with another racial dog whistle: ” ‘I am not a welfare queen,’ says Melissa Bruninga-Matteau.”
Meanwhile, a reader points out another absurdity of McMillen’s explanation for Riley’s ouster. McMillen claimed that a censorious thousands-strong mob had helped her to understand that Riley’s post critical of black studies did not reach “the level of informed opinion.” But the source of Riley’s information was the Chronicle of Higher Education! If she was ill-informed, that was yet another editorial failure on McMillen’s part.
via Sore Lugar – WSJ.com.