From the pen of Milo Yiannopoulos, an old boss of mine:

Professor Rachel Fulton Brown doesn’t look like the dangerous woman her critics describe. But she has become used to reading outlandish descriptions of herself since June 2015, when she published a blog post titled “Three Cheers For White Men,” effectively dropping a barrel of gunpowder into a burgeoning internecine war within Medieval Studies. Three years and hundreds of blog posts later, the tenured University of Chicago history professor is being casually referred to as a “fascist” at medievalist conferences, accused of inciting physical violence and rape against her peers, and avoided like a strumpet with bubonic plague. She has even been called out for bad language by Mark Zuckerberg’s sister Donna.

Fulton Brown’s blog post wasn’t, as her critics claim, a veiled defense of white nationalism, or anything like it. She was responding playfully to the “dead white male” trope in academia, gently pointing out that the wicked caucasian dudes of social justice folklore were responsible for, among other things, the development of chivalry, consensual marriage and, to some extent, the success of feminism itself. But her post went down like a cup of cold sick anyway. Dozens, later hundreds, of Fulton Brown’s colleagues declared war on her, incensed by her refusal to back down and apologize — and by the fact that she had blogged approvingly, a number of times, about a rising star in conservative media who was causing eruptions on campuses with his scathing commentary about the finger-wagging campus Left.

Fulton Brown was taken to task for refusing to acknowledge the problematic “whiteness” of her field and her responsibility as a Medieval Studies professor to “do something about it.” But a dozen senior professors interviewed for this story say something very specific and different is happening: an attempt to inject into the study of the Middle Ages the same far-Left identity politicking that has done so much damage to liberal arts departments. In the course of writing this story, I have interviewed scholars, journalists and authors, many of whom privately confided that Medieval Studies needed a Rachel Fulton Brown to draw a line in the sand, because, for the past half-decade, gender warriors and race scholars with axes to grind have been on a mission to change the field irreversibly.

Sympathetic, but hitherto silent, colleagues say the attempt to destroy Fulton Brown is part of a larger invasion into the discipline by activist academics, who see their role as arbiters of moral taste, determined to rid the field of infidels who refuse to bow to social justice. You’ve read stories before about academics at war over free speech with their own institutions. This is different. It’s the story of a professor who has taken on her entire academic field, with no backing whatsoever from the University of Chicago, an institution that prides itself on its commitment to free speech and academic freedom.

 

Read the whole thing here: https://www.dangerous.com/45111/middle-rages/

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