Thread by @mccormick_ted

I've been a professor for a decade and have been evaluated as a teacher (starting as a TA) for 18 years, so I have a pretty good sense of what the usual complaints about me are:

- voice too monotone
- goes off on tangents when answering questions
- too much reading/writing.

I've received some, but not many, complaints about course content (I teach a range of early modern history courses). Usually these are that I should have said more about some broad topic -- say, wars -- or that I spent too much time on another -- usually religion.

By comparison, friends who teach US and other modern histories seem to get complaints about course content every semester (in particular, for US history, that they spend too much time on race/racism, are promoting a progressive agenda, etc, etc).

It has long seemed to me that students feel more confident criticizing course content for modern courses, where they feel they "know" more to begin with -- and/or where the political implications of certain topics may seem more direct. I don't know whether modernists would agree.

Almost everyone feels they have a valid take on racism in the 20th-century US, whether or not they've actually studied it. But many fewer people feel able -- or perhaps motivated -- to challenge a prof on 17th-century mechanical philosophy or even the workings of the Inquisition.

In some respects this seems an obvious function of historical distance and obscurity. But in other ways it's counterintuitive. I mean, I teach on the origins of capitalism; on the origins of the state and colonial empire; on the creation of modern science, and on Enlightenment.

These are events whose interpretation has shaped the intellectual formation of very different political stances. Yet to the extent that they have felt the need to identify themselves as such, neither conservative nor radical students have had trouble with me or my syllabi.

Until this year.

This year, I've received complaints -- few, but *new* -- about readings being too "postmodern" and/or "Marxist". About readings from whole fields (sociology, e.g.) that are "invalid", and hence that the student is choosing not to read.

I've received long and entirely fictitious accounts of what these allegedly "postmodernist" readings argue. Meanwhile I've gotten flak for teaching about early modern bible criticism, as "offensive", which has never happened to me before.

Again: not *much*, but it's *new*.

It's not, clearly, all coming from one direction. The most wild accusations of "postmodernism" came from an evo-psych angle. The offence at early modern bible scepticism from a conservative religious direction.

One place it's *not* coming from is the allegedly snow-flakey left.

And it's hard not to connect some of it, in chronology, content, and tone, to the way the self-proclaimed "Intellectual" Dark Web has taken up some of these same topics as a playground for its junk history and its junking of history and other academic disciplines.

So perhaps this assault seems to be having some small effect.

If so, though, the most obvious effect is that it's encouraging students who identify as conservative or as Scientific not to read or engage with material or topics that make them uncomfortable or ask them to think.

Like that silly NdGT tweet about explorers, it's encouraging students to imagine that history can be arrived at by logic-chopping rather than work with sources. Or else that every position is mere ideology.

Who benefits from that? Not me, of course, but not the students either.