Commentary: Latest Assault on Black Studies Reaffirms Its Relevance: In April, Naomi Schaefer Riley penned two controversial blogs about eliminating Black studies programs. She wrote a blog post about abolishing Black studies for, of all things, poorly-written and irrelevant dissertations. What she did not let her readers know is that is the case for nearly all dissertations. The first offering of a doctoral candidate is often a hodge-podge of sound and fury, only signifying that the candidate can take feedback and psychological pain well and, under that duress, write anything that pleases the three people on the committee. There are exceptions, but I would dare to venture that most of the outstanding dissertations are from people with full fellowships or who work at the university full-time. As William Germano wrote in his 2005 book, From Dissertation to Book, “what makes a dissertation outstanding to a publisher isn’t exactly the same thing that makes it outstanding to the scholarly community.”
