Uchicago — English Department

ThankYouforHelp
Thu, 24 May 2018 18:03:59 +0000

@Marlowe1 The controversy that is referenced in that letter is due to some obnoxious things written and done by UChicago assistant professor Rachel Fulton Brown. To make a long story short, a professor at Vassar wrote something about how white supremicists were appropriating medieval symbolism to support their causes (this is accurate by the way - The internet is full of neo-nazi posts about the Knights Templar and Cursaders and so on, and of course Hitler did the same thing). The professor advocated for medieval studies teachers to affirmatively reject purported connection in their classroom teaching.

Anyhow, Rachel Fulton Brown publically disagreed in a strange (and vulgar) manner. Then, when she got some push back from the Vassar prof and others in the medieval studies academic world, Brown got angry and got personal, She started posting personal attacks and even pictures of the people disagreeing with her, focusing for some reason on one pf the rare African Americans in the field.

Then it got worse, because Brown used Facebook to get in contact with famous alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, and that jerk started posting his own stories about the controversy, hoping to get his followers to harass the Vassar professor and others. To no one’s surprise, that is exactly what happened next - hate mail and phone calls for everyone! Brown knows Milo because she has written pieces for Breitbart herself, and Milo used to be there before he got sacked for being too controversial even for them.

Anyhow, that’s the controversy. Brown disagreed with a fellow academic, and decided the best way to deal with it was to stir up far-right social media to get at her opponents. Pretty ugly.