I let the Riley controversy fly by me this week, because I was absorbed in other matters. It unexpectedly picked up a lot of steam with attention from every blogger and pundit. My two cents:
I've never taken or taught a class within a black studies department, so I can't say too much about the vigor of that particular department. However, race is extremely relevant to the subject of political science and a perfectly legitimate element of study. It comes into play when talking about representation and voting patterns. It is a huge element of urban politics, political theory, and political history. Is race studied enough within political science? Absolutely not. It is an important lens for understanding political action in this country, and there are not enough people doing work in this area.
The study of race is also an important within other traditional departments in the liberal arts, like History, Literature, and Sociology.
Does it deserve its own department? In an era of scarce resources, can we afford to maintain other interdisciplinary departments, like American Studies or Environmental Policy? These are fair questions that should be debated.
Riley could have taken that tack and she would have had a perfectly legitimate argument. What bothered me most about Riley's post was that she targeted the dissertations of grad students. All dissertations are extremely narrow in scope and can be easily mocked by outsiders as parochial and silly. Also, it's plain mean to mock a defenseless grad student, who doesn't have a job yet or platform to respond to criticism in a major industry newspaper.
More about the controversy from James Joyner.
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