Uchicago — English Department

marlowe1
Wed, 30 May 2018 21:00:30 +0000

@ThankYouforHelp , when I said the History Department “seems to be standing by Brown” I was referring only to the absence of a denunciatory statement on their webpage, as against the very prominent and portentous Open Letter at the very front of the English Department webpage for both graduate and undergraduate studies. I hadn’t noticed what @JBStillFlying with her sharp eyes had noticed - that there is or was a statement, apparently a less denunciatory one, also issued and somewhere to be found for the History Department. I retract “standing by” and replace that phrase with “not unqualifiedly condemning”. It still seems odd that English saw the need to intervene gratuitously in terms so much more emphatic than History, which would seem the appropriate place for comment on a dispute between members of respective History Departments.

You’re right in suggesting that I may be conflating my dislike of the way English is being done nowadays at the U of C with both the content and style of the Open Letter. But surely you would agree that the pedagogical and scholarly perspective of the English Department is closer to that of the Vassar Prof than to Brown. It is hard for me not to think that that animus wasn’t operative in this unreserved condemnation of Brown.

I didn’t have the scholarly chops to try to figure out precisely what happened between the two profs. Correct me if I’m wrong in what follows. It looked like the Vassar prof was asserting that medievalists were presumptively to be considered suspect of alt-right or neo-Nazi sympathies, of which they needed to affirmatively clear themselves by demonstrating a critical and unsympathetic attitude to the ideals of the period. She made an exception for herself as a same-sex person of color who ipso facto could not be capable of such a retrograde perspective.

Whatever you think of the merits of this, it is certainly inflammatory. Brown responded in kind, from the perspective of a very emotional Christian believer of the scholarly vintage. The Vassar Prof (Brown says) then attacked her by name on social media. This in turn led to Brown’s naming the prof in her own blog (where she seems not to have been known at that time as a Chicago Prof). Brown has a big crush on Milo Yannopoulos, so no doubt there are alt-righters who know about her blog and who then chimed in from wherever they lurk in the non-academic world. This must have led to ugly email or postings directed at the Vassar Prof. I don’t doubt that Brown has gotten her own share of ugly mail and postings from the other side. She certainly got that broadside from the English Deparment, which must have been much more to the point. Did any of this do damage to the Vassar Prof? Well, certainly not in the eyes of the Chicago English Department. I have my doubts that she was harmed at all in the only world that must matter to her - the world of the Vassar or any other Department of History.

As a non-academic I always enjoy dustups of this sort. Real passions and ideologies are at stake in this dispute. I like to see that. We occasionally have that sort of thing here on cc.