Now, Obama can’t be blamed for Al Sharpton’s paranoia-inducing rants, or even for Eric Holder’s speech to black pastors, in which he compared states’ requiring legal identification from would-be voters to effectively re-instating pre-Civil Rights Jim Crow laws. Obama’s in the catbird seat. He’s got people; people to do things or say things that he can’t risk. But he won’t distance himself from them, either. The press won’t call him on any of it, which makes that much easier for him to have it both ways.

I’ve said it before; if Romney doesn’t grasp this nettle firmly, rather than allowing the Obama machine and its all-too-willing enablers in the media to dictate the terms of engagement in this race, he’s going to be backing and filling all the way to November. The Times has made the strategy very clear, and put it front and center. Interestingly, they left out the allegation from Ezra Klein’s new book that Obama operative and best buddy Eric Whitaker offered Rev. Wright a big pile of money to shut up and go away – and that Obama himself followed up with a personal plea to do the same. Clearly, Obama and his handlers understand that Rev. Wright and his Black Liberation theology are anathema to most Americans. Should that put him, or Derrick Bell and his Critical Race Theory, off limits? On the contrary, the fact that they’re so clearly afraid of how closer examination of this kind of profoundly divisive and hateful rhetoric might tarnish the halo of the Great Uniter should be a “full speed ahead” sign to the Romney camp. McCain refused to fight on that hill; Romney, who’s already got to deal with the Mormon=Racist smears, has an even tougher task.  But the American people need and frankly deserve to know exactly where Obama got his animating ideals, and what a paltry bill of goods they were sold when they bought into the “post-racial presidency”.  As someone on my Twitter feed pointed out, the GOP are already tarred as racists as far as the left is concerned. We’ve got nothing to lose.

To be sure, Riley didn’t mince words. “If ever there were a case for eliminating the discipline of black studies,” she wrote, “some of the dissertations being offered by the best and the brightest of black-studies graduate students has made it.” She went on to cite particulars, commenting acidly on a number of dubious-sounding dissertations written by young stars in the field.

But it wasn’t so much the specifics of her piece that raised the ire of her critics—tellingly, her attackers rarely even bothered to dispute those in any but the most general terms—but her gall in questioning the value of black studies at all. For she challenged the assumption at the heart of almost all such programs that, as she put it, “nothing much has changed in this country in the past half century when it comes to race.” To the average person, such a notion is so clearly absurd it is hardly worth the breath to say so; but to innumerable academics, especially those in the various departments specializing in racial and ethnic grievance, to challenge it is sacrilege.

To learn that over 6,000 of those shaping young minds at America’s colleges and universities signed a petition demanding Riley’s dismissal—and, even more, to read the comments in response to the posting they found so objectionable—is to despair anew for the nation’s future. There was little reasoned argument, almost no attempt at factual refutation from these supposed defenders of free thought and the lively exchange of ideas, but mainly name calling. As always, the ultimate conversation stopper—“racist”—was at the top of the list, this time aimed at a woman with a black husband and children of mixed race.

Not that, in this instance, the details of Riley’s life, even had she broadcast them, would have done her much good with her critics, who often dismiss the ideal to which most Americans subscribe—race blindness—as a sham designed to hold black people down. Indeed, one of the young black-studies notables whose work Riley took to task, La Tasha B. Levy, has made her academic bones arguing that the black conservatives who propound colorblindness have “played one of the most-significant roles in the assault on the civil-rights legacy that benefited them,” and seek “to legitimize a larger discourse around racial progress that delegitimizes civil-rights policies.”

Interestingly enough, Levy’s CV, which has been posted, reveals that she has won multiple grants, fellowships, and awards for disseminating these views. No shock there: it has been this way for a few academic generations now. Campus grievance peddlers enforce ideological conformity by hiring ever more of their own. Their views, no matter how scornfully regarded outside the academy, hold unquestioned sway within it. Indeed, none ever seems to pay a professional price even for the most provably outrageous transgressions against fairness and civility. On the record, not one of Duke University’s notorious Group of 88—members of the school’s liberal arts faculty who rushed to condemn the white lacrosse players falsely accused of raping a black woman—seems to have suffered any consequences.

As for the editor who did the firing, Liz McMillen, her performance gives groveling a bad name. She noted that “several thousand of you spoke out in outrage and disappointment that The Chronicle had published an article that did not conform to the journalistic standards and civil tone that you expect from us,” and assured readers that “We’ve heard you, and we have taken to heart what you said.” Piously, she added “that you welcome healthy informed debate, but that in this case, we did not live up to the expectations of the community of readers we serve.” Truly, it might have been penned by that dead white male, Kafka.

Naomi Schaefer Riley is a highly capable journalist. She will survive and doubtless continue to do valuable work. But this episode is one more nail in the coffin of American higher education.

Unfortunately, as I’ve noted here before, Al Sharpton remains a powerful voice in the national dialog on race, abetted and given a platform by his enablers in the press who continue to treat him as a legitimate spokesman rather than the cynical race-monger he really is. His rhetorical specialty is pouring gas on whatever racially-charged fires he can fan into life. But words have consequences, and the question in the light of this piece from the Orlando Sentinel is – is he as good at calming down his ad-hoc congregation down as he is at inflaming them? Will he even try? Is there a point at which the folks at NBC will make the obvious connection between his words and these brutal attacks? Will it shame them into firing him?  You may look in vain for national reporting on these incidents, but given the ubiquitous cellphones and the ease of broadcasting via YouTube, they’ll certainly go viral. At some point, even NBC has to say “enough”.