Middle Rages: Why the Battle for Medieval Studies Matters to America is the latest book from the flamboyant, rightwing bomb-thrower Milo Yiannopoulos. The short volume focuses on the curious case of Rachel Fulton Brown, a well-regarded professor at the University of Chicago who recently found herself at the center of a social-media-fueled firestorm.
The story begins with a tongue-in-cheek post the professor wrote on her personal blog in 2015 entitled Three Cheers for White Men, a look at how the maligned “dead white males” of the Western canon helped create modern liberal society. This drew the attention of one Dorothy Kim, an unaccomplished junior academic and dedicated Social Justice Warrior then at Vassar. Kim began sniping at Fulton Brown on social media, often focusing on the fact that she was white, Christian, and a Republican—exactly the sort of nasty insinuation she accused her target of.
After a year and a half of this, Fulton Brown responded with a gentle and humorous blogpost entitled How to Signal You Are Not a White Supremacist. In it, she playfully engaged with Kim’s charge that medieval studies programs are breeding grounds of racism and sexism by showing that any serious study of the Middle Ages completely counters such narratives. The post concluded with the fateful admonition that the best way to countersignal white supremacy is to “learn some f*cking medieval western European Christian history”.
This set off a firestorm, inspiring extreme left-wing academics to write an open letter to the Department of History at the University of Chicago in which they accused Fulton Brown of putting Dorothy Kim’s life in danger by exposing her to an online mob of vicious racists. The entire letter was an exercise in bad faith and willful misinterpretation, beginning with the plainly false claim that Fulton Brown’s exhortation to “learn some f*cking history” was directed at Kim herself.
Worse still was the accusers’ kafkatrapping, using Fulton Brown’s rejection of their premises as prima facie evidence of her guilt. The letter claimed that “her ignorance of basic theoretical principles of race theory renders her an ill-informed and substandard interlocutor in the rigorous scholarly discussion of this important subject.” For the accusers to demand that one lend any credence to critical race theory is by itself an enormous concession to ask; for them to be unwilling to argue their claims against an unconvinced opponent is a tacit admission of utter weakness.
The combination of bad faith and kafkatrapping reached comical absurdity on the point of Fulton Brown’s reference to a black medievalist, whom she mentioned in order to counter Kim’s ludicrous estimate of the demographic makeup of medieval studies. As if deliberately missing the point, the accusers argued that she “claim[s] that medieval studies’ support of a specific person of color negates any relationship the field has to white supremacy” and that this “betray[s] her fundamental lack of knowledge concerning the discourses of structural racism and white supremacy.”
Suffice to say, the 1,500 academics who ended up signing the letter are not people who can be taken seriously. But beneath their sheer silliness lies real malice. The core of the letter’s accusations was that Fulton Brown whipped up an online mob against Kim which threatened the latter’s safety, stemming from the fact that she tagged Milo Yiannopoulos in a Facebook link to her now-infamous blogpost.
Milo is undeniably a deliberately provocative figure. But claims that he is a white supremacist or that he encouraged violence against Kim are simply false. The alleged proof given in the letter includes a Facebook post of his claiming that Fulton Brown had “beat[en] down” Kim in debate, accompanied by an image of a Game of Thrones character wielding a club; another was a post by one of his followers saying that Fulton Brown “gets medieval” on Kim. Neither post even remotely constitutes a threat—if crowing about Kim’s hapless antics was the best the accusers could produce, surely their claims could be dismissed out of hand?
Doubling down, Kim claimed to receive a fresh torrent of abuse in response to this. Milo writes in Middle Rages:
First, Kim had claimed that the threats and harassment had come in via social media. When none could be found, the story changed: the threats had been sent in via email, and there had been prank calls.
Each time questions were raised about the new version of events, the explanation changed yet again: later, when Kim was asked to provide examples of the emails, or screenshots of them, she said she hadn’t received them personally, but they had gone to her department marked for her attention. No one in the field had the courage to point out what was becoming obvious: it was probably all a lie.
The letter concluded by asking the Department of History to “publicly acknowledge and act on your responsibility to protect vulnerable….when your senior faculty violate basic norms of professional behavior and place those less powerful in the path of harassment and other forms of violence.” Although its drafters explicitly abstain from recommending any punitive action against Fulton Brown, this is as close to an explicit demand for her firing as the fork-tongued worms could manage.
In the face of all this, the University of Chicago refused to comment on a professor’s personal blog. This was of personal interest to me because the U of C is my alma mater. Although it was heartening that the university did not give in to the activists’ demands, it is far more disappointing that it did not vigorously defend one of its own. Chicago’s intellectual seriousness and corresponding disregard of politics were what drew me to it in the first place; if a university with so sterling a reputation would not be a forceful voice for sanity, who would?
Middle Rages chronicles the aftermath of this debacle, including the online abuse Fulton Brown began receiving—real, observable abuse from her own colleagues, in contrast to Dorothy Kim’s fictitious claims. It also shows how few academics were willing to vocally oppose the social justice activists. The majority were cowed by the mob, either remaining silent or paying lip-service to the SJWs’ strident demands. This might have preserved them in the short-term, but the accumulation of similar concessions over time has exacted a large price, completely ceding ground to the mob. It has allowed activist professors to, like sleazy salesmen, assume the sale and speak as if the academy’s mission should be social justice.
Those who tacitly consent to their demands ignored a fundamental lesson: any institution that prioritizes some goal other than its stated purpose will fail in that purpose. Although this is not precisely the argument of Middle Rages, it is an inescapable conclusion which must be heeded by all who find themselves unwillingly swept up in a culture war.
And war it is. Contra their stated desires to broaden the horizons of academia and open the canon, the activists who make the most noise produce very little original research. Dorothy Kim’s faculty page, for instance, lists three books to her name, none of which have yet been published: one is on her area of specialty, while the other two are on the politics of medieval studies itself.
This is only surprising if one takes them at their word on their desire to make academia more open-minded and inclusive. But history has shown their aims to be purely subversive and destructive, driven by resentment for which social justice is merely the pretext. And for decades, the academy has treated each new push by these extremists in isolation: the left-leaning majority engages with their demands in good faith, while the right-wing minority cringes in fear at being targeted, like lobsters being boiled. The result has been a hollowing out of the humanities as interesting, genuine scholarship has been replaced by tendentious, dishonest political activism.
Enough of the SJWs and their dispiriting nonsense. What of the scholarship which justifies universities’ existence in the first place? It need not be dependent on the corrupted universities; encouragingly, there is a real appetite among the educated public for serious works on history, literature, and philosophy. The internet has long held out the promise of fulfilling this desire, and many websites have started to make academic work accessible to the general public, while also filtering out some of the worst aspects.
More encouraging still is the community of enthusiastic amateurs on Twitter and on various forums and blogs, many of whom do original research of their own. One of its best aspects is that it is completely free from the existing framework of academic discourse. Just as philosophers as late as the 17th century had to engage with a stultified and hidebound Scholasticism, modern scholars must wade through a vast corpus of secondary literature which often suffers from the same mind-rot as Fulton Brown’s accusers. The online amateur community, by contrast, uses JSTOR, Google Books, and university libraries to pick out the best of current scholarship while blithely ignoring the rest.
Which is not to say that this phenomenon is purely an amateur affair. Many professors have started independent projects online, both for research and to present their results to a wider audience. Rachel Fulton Brown herself now has an online show on medieval history in which she discusses various topics relating to her research.
Does this offer the best hope for Western scholarship? It may seem so. Beyond the malignant social justice infection, universities are facing an existential crisis of another sort: rising tuition costs are meeting unsustainable levels of student debt, even as online options and the devaluation of degrees make four-year colleges less attractive. Judging by financial factors alone, it is hard to imagine even half of existing universities surviving the next thirty years.
Nor have events since the publication of Middle Rages given hope for any sort of internal reform that could reverse this tide. In September of this year, the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists, a professional association for scholars of Anglo-Saxon England, voted to change its name on account of the use of the term “Anglo-Saxon” by white supremacists. This was not, it should be emphasized, in reaction to any particular racist incident, but was justified on purely symbolic grounds.
This is not the behavior of serious people who take pride in their work. The inability of academia to resist such arrant nonsense reflects a loss of confidence in Western universities in particular and Western institutions more generally. As the current incarnation of academe dies a well-deserved death, it is therefore up to good-faith professionals and amateurs alike to build new institutions, expressly free from malign or subversive influence, where genuine, interesting scholarship can flourish. Therein lies cause for hope.
Rachel Fulton Brown’s online medieval history program can be found at https://www.unauthorized.tv/programs/medieval-history-ecffd1. She blogs at https://fencingbearatprayer.blogspot.com.
Middle Rages: Why the Battle for Medieval Studies Matters to America is available at Amazon and Arkhaven Comics.