Back-to-School

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P.S. In case it's not clear, they're talking about me. Maybe. You never know. Maybe I just want them to be talking about me.

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F.B.

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Mary and Martha, or What I Did in My Summer Vacation

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It has been quite the summer.

First I learned how to search Twitter and discovered what my academic colleagues have really been saying about Milo and mefor the pastseveral years.

Then there was the takeover of the Kalamazoo Medieval Congress Facebook group by the SJWs.

Then there was Milo’s magnum opus about the controversy in my field.

Then there was getting to see Milo and my friends from Three Kraters in person.

There there were the invitations to appear on YouTube videos and podcasts.

Then there was the Open Letter that the National Association of Scholars wrote in my support—not to mention the thousand-plus signatures it has received.

Then there was the continuing pressure on the part of my academic colleagues for me to stay quiet.

Then there are all the arguments still to be made on the culture front.

A girl might be forgiven for finding it hard to settle down and—as Milo keeps telling me I should—getback to work!



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The National Association of Scholars has written a letter addressed to my university and to the Medieval Academy of America asking them, as institutions, to affirm that I remain a scholar in good standing based on my conduct over the past year while under fire from my own colleagues in academia.

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Although universities generally refrain from taking sides in academic debates, the NAS open letter is asking Chicago and the MAA to do something different, and merely affirm that Fulton Brown is an academic in good professional standing who has not harassed or discriminated against her colleagues. This is a matter of historical record, and should not be …
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“to say nothing of all the stuff I do behind the scenes I can never tell you about.”  Not sure why you're defending the indefensible.  —JustJinxed, commenting on Three Kraters Symposium, Episode 58: Politicon Caves to Twitter Outrage and Pulls Milo from Lineup  I get this kind of comment a lot from my academic colleagues, even those who are otherwise sympathetic to me. They don’t know how much I am in contact with Milo or the kinds of things he and I have been talking about, and they tend to assume that Milo is as he has been portrayed in the mainstream media or by Buzzfeed: an agent provocateur, someone who is outrageous purely for material gain, a grifter, not a serious interlocutor, doing what he does for the sake of publicity and nothing else. How is it possible for me to defend such a person? Surely doing so, as one friend recently put it, is at odds with everything I am as an intellectual.
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