This paper by Richard Utz was delivered at this year’s International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University.
By Richard Utz
Once upon a time, one year after I started my first teaching position in the U.S. at the University of Northern Iowa, a scholar by the name of Gerald Graff published a widely received book, entitled Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education, in which he reframed some of the country’s fiercest educational debates as a source of energy rather than decay. In this 1992 book, Graff argues that clashes over multiculturalism, the canon, and political correctness signal intellectual vitality—and that educators should harness, not hide, them. His bold prescription is to “teach the conflicts,” bringing these disputes into the classroom to combat student apathy and curricular fragmentation. Written as a response to traditionalist critics of higher education, the book is both a critique and a call to action: Mobilize controversy to reinvigorate the life of the mind.
The higher ed landscape within which Graff offered his recommendations in 1992 includes major financial crises, the federal regulation of for-profit institutions (Higher Education Reauthorization Act), debates over the curriculum (specifically the Western Canon vs. Diversity; Political Correctness), a Supreme Court ruling that Mississippi had failed to desegregate its higher education system, and intense pressure for financial aid reform, including a U.S. Justice Department anti-trust suit accusing Ivy League colleges of colluding on financial aid grants to students. As universities were facing a major “bashing” from the public due to rising tuition and scandals, they were confronted with a diminished public image and widespread demands for greater accountability.
I mention these 1992 highlights because Gerald Graff’s approach to dealing with some of the major issues in the early 1990s needs contextualization. Henry Gonshak, one of the book’s reviewers, offers such a frame:
From neoconservatives such as Roger Kimball, Hilton Kramer, and Dinesh D’Souza (and from some old-fashioned liberal humanists as well, including Arthur Schlesinger […]) come charges that a cadre of “tenured radicals,” frustrated old hippies who’ve transferred their countercultural revolution from the streets to the more hospitable groves of academe, have politicized English studies, using literary criticism as a pretext to preach their left-wing “P.C.” gospel on issues of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation.
From those radicals themselves comes the heated rejoinder that the literary canon has been politicized all along, composed by phallocentric Dead White Males in order to bolster the hegemony of Western culture against subversive incursions by women, minorities, and the post-colonial world. Radical criticism, professors such as Stanley Fish, Houston Baker, and Elaine Showalter insist, has simply exposed this hidden agenda, while demanding that traditionally marginalized cultures be given the academic attention they deserve.
Graff’s book proposed a via media for the situation in which he found himself, a middle ground he had explored and tested in his own teaching practice: While professors debated these conflicting positions intensely amongst themselves, they shied away from including them in their teaching. Graff observed that undergraduates might move from one class, where they are taught that the Western literary tradition imparts sempiternal values, to another where they hear that “all teaching is inevitably political” and that we should drop Dante and Shakespeare for The Color Purple. Although Graff acknowledged that each course offers value, he suggested that student learning suffers whenever instructors obliterate the legitimacy of opposing viewpoints.
Graff argued that, for students to learn best, the curriculum should work like a Jefferson-style “marketplace of ideas.” Different sides in the culture wars would all get a fair hearing – canonical alongside multicultural texts, and philology and new criticism alongside feminist, Marxist, and poststructuralist approaches. The idea was to put all these perspectives next to each other and let students decide for themselves what they find most convincing. Graff himself did this for example via pitching Conrad’s Heart of Darkness with Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.
Teaching the Conflicts not only implied a steep increase in the number of humanities classes, but it would also have required that, parsed here for 1990s medieval studies, Princeton’s John V. Fleming, Yale’s Roberta Frank, or Loyola Chicago’s Allen Frantzen co-teach a class with, let’s say Hunter College’s Jo Ann McNamara, Northwestern’s Barbara Newman, or New York University’s Carolyn Dinshaw. Since these conditions were unrealistic, Graff’s book remained a critical utopia. It may have found somewhat of a corollary in the Norton Critical Editions book series which, in addition to expertly annotated original medieval texts, sources, analogues, and glossaries, included classical traditional readings together with more recent ones. From the 1990s onward other book series like Bedford/St. Martin’s Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism offered a less tradition-leaning fare for medieval classroom teaching by condensing older criticism into a summary and offering full-length articles exemplifying the current approaches also used by colleagues in postmedieval studies.
It isn’t hard to see how the discord evident in the 1990s did not only remain unresolved but has grown worse: The debates about the inclusion of more diverse authors in the Western literary canon evolved into movements to “decolonize” all university curricula; the battle between natural scientists and postmodernists about science as a mere social construct helped fuel public challenges to the scientific consensus on climate change and public health; and debates on political correctness and speech codes are now full-scale debates over cancel culture and academic freedom. More generally, access to higher education has not improved, with the share of first-generation students dropping from 66% in 1996 to 53% in 2020; and Americans’ overall confidence in higher education has not only been waning, but confidence levels are now highly polarized depending on party affiliation, with only 19% of Republicans reporting confidence in 2023, substantially down from 56% in 2015.
By the 2024 presidential election, disenchantment with higher education had become one of the populist tag lines in the larger political realignment that drove election results as well as policies and mandates following elections. As a result, we have recently seen the dismantling of the Department of Education and numerous agencies overseeing federal funding, the dissolution of offices and programs promoting diversity and equity, and the weakening of the protections for academic freedom, due process, and economic security, the preconditions for faculty to pursue scholarship and teach controversial topics without fear of reprisal or termination.
Those who support such changes claim they are necessary because universities have become intellectual deserts and indoctrination machines, allowing “hecklers’ vetoes,” banning “offensive speech,” and imposing excessive permission rules for non-mainstream student groups, all in an effort to perpetuate a progressive viewpoint orthodoxy within which one in five students reports regular self-censoring “fairly often” or “very often” for fear of being shamed or penalized for holding non-progressive views. Since January 2025, faculty have been increasingly concerned about students recording their lectures, social media attacks, and legislative pressure. They also report avoiding controversial topics, modifying their syllabi and classroom language. FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, found in their Scholars Under Fire, Students Under Fire, and Campus Deplatforming data collections that 2025 was the year with the highest number of publicly known censorship activities on U.S. campuses since they keep records (c. 2005). FIRE analysts conclude that censorship is coming from both sides of the political spectrum: FIRE’s data shows, for example, that while liberal students are punished for pro-Palestinian activism, conservative faculty are targeted for their views on race and gender. The two student groups targeted most often are Students for Justice in Palestine and Turning Point USA.
What does all this mean for medievalists? There is little doubt that public engagement of those in medieval studies, and especially in medievalism studies, has surged since the 1990s. I think that is generally a good thing, but it is also true that entering the public realm has directed some unintended attention to our work, especially to what Jacob L. Mackey has called “barricade scholarship.” Is our situation different from the rest of the academy? To the best of my knowledge, there is no statistical data about how we, as a group, are affected by internal or external pressures and censorship. For the purposes of a presentation at the 61st International Congress on Medieval Studies, I created an anonymized qualtrics survey, which was sent to the TEAMS, Medievally Speaking, and Georgia Medieval Group mailing lists, approximately 1000 colleagues. I received a total of 58 valid responses, and therefore the statistical value of the results is quite limited. I share the summary results only as an episodic backdrop for further discussion:
On the question “Throughout your career, have you felt the need to adjust and modify your topics and methodologies for medieval(ist) college and university classes due to external pressures,” 55% answered “yes” and 45% “no.”
On the question “When under pressure to change your topics and methodologies for medieval studies or medievalism studies classes over the last two years, where did the pressure originate?” the answers were:
federal government: 5%
regional/state government: 7%
university/college leadership: 15%
colleagues in my field: 5%
students in my classes: 12%
multiple origins: 38% (mostly combinations of institutional and government mentioned)
other: 19% (mostly without further detail given)
On the question, “When under pressure to change your topics and methodologies over the last two years, 20% indicated they did so because they were “in danger of being reprimanded,” 5% because they felt “in danger of losing their job,” and 75% because of “other” reasons (without providing much further detail).
Answers to the question about which changes faculty felt compelled to make (in the past or in recent years) yielded the same kinds of responses revealed by existing national polls: Most colleagues mention at least some degree of self-censoring, curricular modification, and changes in assessment but much of it at the level of terminology, as in publicly visible course titles and descriptions. These responses vary based on geographical location and institution.
In response to the question about how the changes colleagues made affected specific topics in medieval studies or medievalism studies, gender and diversity were mentioned multiple times. However, colleagues also report issues like the reduction of teaching historical languages, increased need to teach in translation, and a general decrease in premodern subject matter as pressures they experience. Colleagues in general have been adjusting their subject matter based on what their changing student populations need. In addition, colleagues reported observations like the following:
“People want a Christian Middle Ages, with Jewish erasure. The pressure recently has been to teach only subjects where Jews are unlikely to appear, or to erase the Jewish aspects of the subject.”
“Taught lessons from the perspective of both a believing Muslim and from the perspective of historians. The sensitive political climate made it hard for students to see historical methodology as non-hostile.”
“In the German system as a full professor I had complete freedom in organizing my seminars as I saw fit.”
On the question, if these adjustments in teaching had any unexpected positive consequences, or if all consequences were deleterious to faculty objectives and outcomes for classes and student learning, responses vary: Many colleagues report feeling depressed and unprotected when it comes to adjusting their work for reasons they deem non-professional. They call the pressures “pernicious” and “damaging beyond measure.” Some deplore the loss of academic rigor and depth in classrooms in the areas of science, gender, and race, which they attribute to students’ expecting simplified narratives that align with some currently prevalent ideologies. However, just as many colleagues report positive outcomes, including increased engagement from students who continue to appreciate the relevance of historical content to modern issues. Some voices suggest that the various external pressures have led to a renewed sense of solidarity and purpose among faculty and students. As one colleague stated: “I think students appreciate the care with which these contexts are delivered. There have been moments of surprising hostility, like teaching about medievalism and medieval-inspired white suprem[a]cist tattoos.
A few students with conservative politics resisted seeing these as signs of political affiliation.” Another colleague states: “I try to anticipate where the conflicts will be so that they don’t become a sticking point. Generally, when students resist a text or topic, the other students become allies in making it clear that no line of inquiry should be off limits in a classroom.”
And another colleague explains: “I speak about myself a lot less than I used to, which I also think helps remove potential issues of teacher bias because of my own identity and work in the field of medievalism studies.” There was a general sense among respondents that “it is always healthy to examine and reassess terminology, learning objectives, and learning outcomes,” irrespective of the cause.
Responses to the question about which recommendations faculty would offer to colleagues confronted by external pressures on their work showed many variables: Reaching out to colleagues, allies, and professional organizations (faculty senate; AAUP, MLA) to share experiences and decrease feeling like the proverbial “lone medievalist;” supporting faculty in states where “even talking and teaching about mainstream history and literature can get you fired,” and supporting non-citizen/immigrant colleagues who may feel even more existential pressures; couching facts and moral opinions “in careful neutrality,” but without changing the content of one’s teaching; adhering to the boundaries set, but “exploit[ing] loop holes;” “do[ing] what you can live with;” “satisfy[ing] the threatening authoritarian just enough while seeking ways to provide students actual and genuine learning, without making yourself sick trying to do the impossible.”
One colleague challenges: “If you can ‘adjust due to external pressures,’ ask yourself whether your so-called controversial content was EVER[Y] integral to your teaching and life or whether you were, like so many turn out to have been, window-dressing for social approval. If you can teach your period without ‘woke stuff’ at all, were you ever sincere? Or are you secretly relieved? If you’re secretly relieved, just be honest about it. The cover-ups are how we got into this mess as a country in the first place.”
And there is this quote, which represents best the collegial tenor I sensed: “I truly believe there’s power in numbers and that, rather than knights errant, we should rely on solidarity, not on each taking the adventure before us to test our unique pedagogical mettle. I think we need to talk more about how to advocate for our field, for the liberal arts and humanities, for education and inquiry as public goods. If we stand together we are stronger and can move into a better, kinder, more thoughtful world.”
Reading these medievalists’ (episodic) responses to my questionnaire made me wonder if a modified version of Gerald Graff’s idea about Teaching the Conflicts might still offer a solution for a good many of us and our classrooms: I am not thinking about the ham-fisted or performative attempts to engineer “viewpoint diversity” on campuses without addressing the bona fide causes of intellectual exclusion. I also don’t believe we shall see Geraldine Heng or Mary Rambaran-Olm engage in truth-seeking fireside chats (let alone teach collaborative classes) together with Rachel Fulton Brown or Dominic Sandbrook, in the same way that Cornell West and Robert P. George have done so exceptionally well over the years.
What I can imagine is this: A dozen respondents to the questionnaire expressed, in various ways, that they did not need or want to move students towards a specific ideological perspective via their textual and methodological choices. Instead, they intend to trust their students to develop their own viewpoints, informed by in-depth discussions and based on access to multiple and often conflicting original sources, criticism, and theory. True education, they seem to suggest, must be more than the mere socialization to some currently prevailing academic vocabulary and ideology. Instead, students should be encouraged to examine all vocabularies, ideologies, as well as their foundations.
I am convinced that the dialectic of opposing intellectual forces, the confronting Thomas Aquinas’ and Hildegard of Bingen’s views on the nature of women and men, John of Salisbury’s and Marsilius of Padua’s stances on social order, or the examining of the continuities and discontinuities from medieval through contemporary antisemitisms allows our students to draft and develop their own viewpoints. And since we know, at least since Paul Zumthor’s Parler du Moyen Age, that it is a “delusion … to speak of the past otherwise than on the basis of now,” discussing past conflicts will ineluctably lead to comparing them with current ones. For these, too, we can offer jarring views from the vast marketplace of ubiquitous contemporary popular and scholarly medievalisms. All that remains to do is train our students, and ourselves, at staging playful disputationes in scolis, in the current climate perhaps with Chatham House rules as an added integumental device against those not really in favor of a true diversity of voices, but the silencing of those with whom they disagree. That’s what I intend to do, because I believe that the college classroom remains an essential (semi-)public space within which the culture wars can be performed, not necessarily ironically, but certainly benevolently and responsibly.
Richard Utz is Professor of Medievalism Studies in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech.
Top Image: A medieval university classroom – Laurentius de Voltolina Vorlesung vor Studenten – Min 1233 – Kupferstichkabinett Berlin
This paper by Richard Utz was delivered at this year’s International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University.
By Richard Utz
Once upon a time, one year after I started my first teaching position in the U.S. at the University of Northern Iowa, a scholar by the name of Gerald Graff published a widely received book, entitled Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education, in which he reframed some of the country’s fiercest educational debates as a source of energy rather than decay. In this 1992 book, Graff argues that clashes over multiculturalism, the canon, and political correctness signal intellectual vitality—and that educators should harness, not hide, them. His bold prescription is to “teach the conflicts,” bringing these disputes into the classroom to combat student apathy and curricular fragmentation. Written as a response to traditionalist critics of higher education, the book is both a critique and a call to action: Mobilize controversy to reinvigorate the life of the mind.
The higher ed landscape within which Graff offered his recommendations in 1992 includes major financial crises, the federal regulation of for-profit institutions (Higher Education Reauthorization Act), debates over the curriculum (specifically the Western Canon vs. Diversity; Political Correctness), a Supreme Court ruling that Mississippi had failed to desegregate its higher education system, and intense pressure for financial aid reform, including a U.S. Justice Department anti-trust suit accusing Ivy League colleges of colluding on financial aid grants to students. As universities were facing a major “bashing” from the public due to rising tuition and scandals, they were confronted with a diminished public image and widespread demands for greater accountability.
I mention these 1992 highlights because Gerald Graff’s approach to dealing with some of the major issues in the early 1990s needs contextualization. Henry Gonshak, one of the book’s reviewers, offers such a frame:
From neoconservatives such as Roger Kimball, Hilton Kramer, and Dinesh D’Souza (and from some old-fashioned liberal humanists as well, including Arthur Schlesinger […]) come charges that a cadre of “tenured radicals,” frustrated old hippies who’ve transferred their countercultural revolution from the streets to the more hospitable groves of academe, have politicized English studies, using literary criticism as a pretext to preach their left-wing “P.C.” gospel on issues of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation.
From those radicals themselves comes the heated rejoinder that the literary canon has been politicized all along, composed by phallocentric Dead White Males in order to bolster the hegemony of Western culture against subversive incursions by women, minorities, and the post-colonial world. Radical criticism, professors such as Stanley Fish, Houston Baker, and Elaine Showalter insist, has simply exposed this hidden agenda, while demanding that traditionally marginalized cultures be given the academic attention they deserve.
Graff’s book proposed a via media for the situation in which he found himself, a middle ground he had explored and tested in his own teaching practice: While professors debated these conflicting positions intensely amongst themselves, they shied away from including them in their teaching. Graff observed that undergraduates might move from one class, where they are taught that the Western literary tradition imparts sempiternal values, to another where they hear that “all teaching is inevitably political” and that we should drop Dante and Shakespeare for The Color Purple. Although Graff acknowledged that each course offers value, he suggested that student learning suffers whenever instructors obliterate the legitimacy of opposing viewpoints.
Graff argued that, for students to learn best, the curriculum should work like a Jefferson-style “marketplace of ideas.” Different sides in the culture wars would all get a fair hearing – canonical alongside multicultural texts, and philology and new criticism alongside feminist, Marxist, and poststructuralist approaches. The idea was to put all these perspectives next to each other and let students decide for themselves what they find most convincing. Graff himself did this for example via pitching Conrad’s Heart of Darkness with Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.
Teaching the Conflicts not only implied a steep increase in the number of humanities classes, but it would also have required that, parsed here for 1990s medieval studies, Princeton’s John V. Fleming, Yale’s Roberta Frank, or Loyola Chicago’s Allen Frantzen co-teach a class with, let’s say Hunter College’s Jo Ann McNamara, Northwestern’s Barbara Newman, or New York University’s Carolyn Dinshaw. Since these conditions were unrealistic, Graff’s book remained a critical utopia. It may have found somewhat of a corollary in the Norton Critical Editions book series which, in addition to expertly annotated original medieval texts, sources, analogues, and glossaries, included classical traditional readings together with more recent ones. From the 1990s onward other book series like Bedford/St. Martin’s Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism offered a less tradition-leaning fare for medieval classroom teaching by condensing older criticism into a summary and offering full-length articles exemplifying the current approaches also used by colleagues in postmedieval studies.
It isn’t hard to see how the discord evident in the 1990s did not only remain unresolved but has grown worse: The debates about the inclusion of more diverse authors in the Western literary canon evolved into movements to “decolonize” all university curricula; the battle between natural scientists and postmodernists about science as a mere social construct helped fuel public challenges to the scientific consensus on climate change and public health; and debates on political correctness and speech codes are now full-scale debates over cancel culture and academic freedom. More generally, access to higher education has not improved, with the share of first-generation students dropping from 66% in 1996 to 53% in 2020; and Americans’ overall confidence in higher education has not only been waning, but confidence levels are now highly polarized depending on party affiliation, with only 19% of Republicans reporting confidence in 2023, substantially down from 56% in 2015.
By the 2024 presidential election, disenchantment with higher education had become one of the populist tag lines in the larger political realignment that drove election results as well as policies and mandates following elections. As a result, we have recently seen the dismantling of the Department of Education and numerous agencies overseeing federal funding, the dissolution of offices and programs promoting diversity and equity, and the weakening of the protections for academic freedom, due process, and economic security, the preconditions for faculty to pursue scholarship and teach controversial topics without fear of reprisal or termination.
Those who support such changes claim they are necessary because universities have become intellectual deserts and indoctrination machines, allowing “hecklers’ vetoes,” banning “offensive speech,” and imposing excessive permission rules for non-mainstream student groups, all in an effort to perpetuate a progressive viewpoint orthodoxy within which one in five students reports regular self-censoring “fairly often” or “very often” for fear of being shamed or penalized for holding non-progressive views. Since January 2025, faculty have been increasingly concerned about students recording their lectures, social media attacks, and legislative pressure. They also report avoiding controversial topics, modifying their syllabi and classroom language. FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, found in their Scholars Under Fire, Students Under Fire, and Campus Deplatforming data collections that 2025 was the year with the highest number of publicly known censorship activities on U.S. campuses since they keep records (c. 2005). FIRE analysts conclude that censorship is coming from both sides of the political spectrum: FIRE’s data shows, for example, that while liberal students are punished for pro-Palestinian activism, conservative faculty are targeted for their views on race and gender. The two student groups targeted most often are Students for Justice in Palestine and Turning Point USA.
What does all this mean for medievalists? There is little doubt that public engagement of those in medieval studies, and especially in medievalism studies, has surged since the 1990s. I think that is generally a good thing, but it is also true that entering the public realm has directed some unintended attention to our work, especially to what Jacob L. Mackey has called “barricade scholarship.” Is our situation different from the rest of the academy? To the best of my knowledge, there is no statistical data about how we, as a group, are affected by internal or external pressures and censorship. For the purposes of a presentation at the 61st International Congress on Medieval Studies, I created an anonymized qualtrics survey, which was sent to the TEAMS, Medievally Speaking, and Georgia Medieval Group mailing lists, approximately 1000 colleagues. I received a total of 58 valid responses, and therefore the statistical value of the results is quite limited. I share the summary results only as an episodic backdrop for further discussion:
On the question “Throughout your career, have you felt the need to adjust and modify your topics and methodologies for medieval(ist) college and university classes due to external pressures,” 55% answered “yes” and 45% “no.”
On the question “When under pressure to change your topics and methodologies for medieval studies or medievalism studies classes over the last two years, where did the pressure originate?” the answers were:
On the question, “When under pressure to change your topics and methodologies over the last two years, 20% indicated they did so because they were “in danger of being reprimanded,” 5% because they felt “in danger of losing their job,” and 75% because of “other” reasons (without providing much further detail).
Answers to the question about which changes faculty felt compelled to make (in the past or in recent years) yielded the same kinds of responses revealed by existing national polls: Most colleagues mention at least some degree of self-censoring, curricular modification, and changes in assessment but much of it at the level of terminology, as in publicly visible course titles and descriptions. These responses vary based on geographical location and institution.
In response to the question about how the changes colleagues made affected specific topics in medieval studies or medievalism studies, gender and diversity were mentioned multiple times. However, colleagues also report issues like the reduction of teaching historical languages, increased need to teach in translation, and a general decrease in premodern subject matter as pressures they experience. Colleagues in general have been adjusting their subject matter based on what their changing student populations need. In addition, colleagues reported observations like the following:
“People want a Christian Middle Ages, with Jewish erasure. The pressure recently has been to teach only subjects where Jews are unlikely to appear, or to erase the Jewish aspects of the subject.”
“Taught lessons from the perspective of both a believing Muslim and from the perspective of historians. The sensitive political climate made it hard for students to see historical methodology as non-hostile.”
“In the German system as a full professor I had complete freedom in organizing my seminars as I saw fit.”
On the question, if these adjustments in teaching had any unexpected positive consequences, or if all consequences were deleterious to faculty objectives and outcomes for classes and student learning, responses vary: Many colleagues report feeling depressed and unprotected when it comes to adjusting their work for reasons they deem non-professional. They call the pressures “pernicious” and “damaging beyond measure.” Some deplore the loss of academic rigor and depth in classrooms in the areas of science, gender, and race, which they attribute to students’ expecting simplified narratives that align with some currently prevalent ideologies. However, just as many colleagues report positive outcomes, including increased engagement from students who continue to appreciate the relevance of historical content to modern issues. Some voices suggest that the various external pressures have led to a renewed sense of solidarity and purpose among faculty and students. As one colleague stated: “I think students appreciate the care with which these contexts are delivered. There have been moments of surprising hostility, like teaching about medievalism and medieval-inspired white suprem[a]cist tattoos.
A few students with conservative politics resisted seeing these as signs of political affiliation.” Another colleague states: “I try to anticipate where the conflicts will be so that they don’t become a sticking point. Generally, when students resist a text or topic, the other students become allies in making it clear that no line of inquiry should be off limits in a classroom.”
And another colleague explains: “I speak about myself a lot less than I used to, which I also think helps remove potential issues of teacher bias because of my own identity and work in the field of medievalism studies.” There was a general sense among respondents that “it is always healthy to examine and reassess terminology, learning objectives, and learning outcomes,” irrespective of the cause.
Responses to the question about which recommendations faculty would offer to colleagues confronted by external pressures on their work showed many variables: Reaching out to colleagues, allies, and professional organizations (faculty senate; AAUP, MLA) to share experiences and decrease feeling like the proverbial “lone medievalist;” supporting faculty in states where “even talking and teaching about mainstream history and literature can get you fired,” and supporting non-citizen/immigrant colleagues who may feel even more existential pressures; couching facts and moral opinions “in careful neutrality,” but without changing the content of one’s teaching; adhering to the boundaries set, but “exploit[ing] loop holes;” “do[ing] what you can live with;” “satisfy[ing] the threatening authoritarian just enough while seeking ways to provide students actual and genuine learning, without making yourself sick trying to do the impossible.”
One colleague challenges: “If you can ‘adjust due to external pressures,’ ask yourself whether your so-called controversial content was EVER[Y] integral to your teaching and life or whether you were, like so many turn out to have been, window-dressing for social approval. If you can teach your period without ‘woke stuff’ at all, were you ever sincere? Or are you secretly relieved? If you’re secretly relieved, just be honest about it. The cover-ups are how we got into this mess as a country in the first place.”
And there is this quote, which represents best the collegial tenor I sensed: “I truly believe there’s power in numbers and that, rather than knights errant, we should rely on solidarity, not on each taking the adventure before us to test our unique pedagogical mettle. I think we need to talk more about how to advocate for our field, for the liberal arts and humanities, for education and inquiry as public goods. If we stand together we are stronger and can move into a better, kinder, more thoughtful world.”
Reading these medievalists’ (episodic) responses to my questionnaire made me wonder if a modified version of Gerald Graff’s idea about Teaching the Conflicts might still offer a solution for a good many of us and our classrooms: I am not thinking about the ham-fisted or performative attempts to engineer “viewpoint diversity” on campuses without addressing the bona fide causes of intellectual exclusion. I also don’t believe we shall see Geraldine Heng or Mary Rambaran-Olm engage in truth-seeking fireside chats (let alone teach collaborative classes) together with Rachel Fulton Brown or Dominic Sandbrook, in the same way that Cornell West and Robert P. George have done so exceptionally well over the years.
What I can imagine is this: A dozen respondents to the questionnaire expressed, in various ways, that they did not need or want to move students towards a specific ideological perspective via their textual and methodological choices. Instead, they intend to trust their students to develop their own viewpoints, informed by in-depth discussions and based on access to multiple and often conflicting original sources, criticism, and theory. True education, they seem to suggest, must be more than the mere socialization to some currently prevailing academic vocabulary and ideology. Instead, students should be encouraged to examine all vocabularies, ideologies, as well as their foundations.
I am convinced that the dialectic of opposing intellectual forces, the confronting Thomas Aquinas’ and Hildegard of Bingen’s views on the nature of women and men, John of Salisbury’s and Marsilius of Padua’s stances on social order, or the examining of the continuities and discontinuities from medieval through contemporary antisemitisms allows our students to draft and develop their own viewpoints. And since we know, at least since Paul Zumthor’s Parler du Moyen Age, that it is a “delusion … to speak of the past otherwise than on the basis of now,” discussing past conflicts will ineluctably lead to comparing them with current ones. For these, too, we can offer jarring views from the vast marketplace of ubiquitous contemporary popular and scholarly medievalisms. All that remains to do is train our students, and ourselves, at staging playful disputationes in scolis, in the current climate perhaps with Chatham House rules as an added integumental device against those not really in favor of a true diversity of voices, but the silencing of those with whom they disagree. That’s what I intend to do, because I believe that the college classroom remains an essential (semi-)public space within which the culture wars can be performed, not necessarily ironically, but certainly benevolently and responsibly.
Richard Utz is Professor of Medievalism Studies in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech.
Top Image: A medieval university classroom – Laurentius de Voltolina Vorlesung vor Studenten – Min 1233 – Kupferstichkabinett Berlin
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