Our reader and commenter Robert, a.k.a. “Whitewall”, has sent along an item from the University of Chicago Divinity School’s newsletter Sightings. It’s a fascinating glimpse into the mind of the postmodern cult-Marx priesthood that haunts the halls of the 21st-century Cathedral. (That is to say, the ones who are responsible for the grooming and education of the pupae of our cultural and social elites.)
The author has an interesting bio:
Dr. Karl E. H. Seigfried is an author, educator, and performer finishing his third graduate degree, an MA at the University of Chicago Divinity School. He is President of Interfaith Dialogue at the University of Chicago and the first practitioner of ÁsatrÁº to enter one of the Divinity School’s graduate programs. His biography, publications, and contact information can be found at www.norsemyth.org.
The problem addressed in Dr. Siegfried’s essay is one that most of us wouldn’t find particularly clamant: the paucity of non-white academics specializing in medieval European history and literature, and how very little of that history and literature seems to focus — clearly because of bias and oppression — on medieval Europeans “of color”.
That would be bad enough all by itself, but what truly makes makes this a full-blown crisis for Western civilization is that certain groups of people have dared to claim this heritage as their own, and to celebrate it, not without some pride, as distinctly European. Shockingly, the story doesn’t end there: the people doing this seem overwhelmingly to be white.
Given that this poses a threat to human survival on a par with the Toba bottleneck, something must be done. The problem, however, is that those who actually take even the slightest interest in medieval European history tend overwhelmingly, for some reason, to be people of pallor (such as Dr. Seigfried himself).
Clearly, then, drastic action is needed:
The clearest way forward is one that even many progressive scholars don’t want to hear about: affirmative action in academic hiring. This is the clearest answer, not the simplest or the quickest. We need a coherent system designed and put into place by individual departments with support from their parent institutions, and we need it now.
Commitment to hiring members of underrepresented communities as tenure-track appointments will not work out without a wide pool of postgraduates in the given field. Wide pools of postgraduates will not exist without diversity within undergraduate programs. Diversity within undergraduate programs cannot happen without robust recruiting at the secondary education level. There must be simultaneous commitment at all levels for any real change to happen.
All good, of course, but I’m not sure that Dr. Seigfried’s plan of attack is sufficiently comprehensive. We should consider some sort of intervention in utero.
This is not to say, though, that Dr. Seigfried isn’t taking the crisis seriously. He continues, with admirable boldness (my emphasis):
Departmental hiring committees have to move beyond tired claims of objectivity that regularly lead to the whitest candidate being the one hired and instead declare, for example, that the next five hires must be made from underrepresented communities.
There is simply no more time to waste on idle chit-chat, people. As Dr. Seigfried explains:
When neo-Nazis are literally marching in the streets looking to assault anyone who denounces their beliefs, we need to stop the endless parsing and take action.
I had rather thought it was the other guys doing most of the marching and assaulting, but obviously I’m out of touch. To the ramparts! There isn’t a moment to lose.
Read the rest here.
4 Comments
I know we have to laugh, but medieval studies are a haven for some critically endangered scholars and antiquarians.
Some of them still teach Dante; I had a young art history prof say she (yes, she) didn’t like revolutionaries because they ‘mostly just break things’- in a lecture! And she wasn’t ratted out, denounced or dipped over the bonfire.
They may have the potential to sink lower than the anthropology department, for all I know, but their field has been spared much ruin because no one has ever considered it politically useful.
A clown like this guy doesn’t front-run the vanguard. They’ve long run out of things to break – so most might have thought. They’ll unfortunately find a real windfall in that wing of the university, one of the last.
I wholeheartedly support all expansion of affirmative action. Being denied a tenure track position solely on the basis of ethnicity is one of the few reliable means of convincing erstwhile liberal academics that universalism is a self-destructive ideology.
A week does not go by without seeing similar calls for the exclusion of whites from sundry institutions or organizations. These passionate exhortations lay bare a sense of urgency – desperacy, really – as the failure of nearly 60 years of social engineering becomes evident to even the most obtuse observer. Americans are increasingly divided as to the cause of this failure, but there is almost unanimous agreement that the experiment has indeed failed. Seigfried has no doubts as to the cause and where to place the blame: it is the Wreckers, the Whites that stubbornly resist, and they must be rooted out. America is now plumbing such depths of absurdity that the question, “where do we go from here,” does not engender much hope for the future, which appears to be approaching at increasing speed.
We are witnessing an amazing phenomenon of mass delusion that has spared a shrinking minority of the intellectual class. This will either be consumed by its own internal madness, or for the rest of us it will not end well.
Well, at least that further disproves my long ago assumption that Asatru was the neopagan religion for wannabe Vikings and neo-Nazi Nordicists- clearly the religion is diverse enough to encompass insane sub-Marxist prog-males. I’ll bet the sectarian conflicts within Asatru are going to be fun, if they aren’t already. Weimar Germany with slightly more runes.