Post by Dr. Rachel Schine / Redsky

My children, Mohammed and Haneen, dreamed of continuing their studies, but the war took away their education. Amid the bombing and danger, there is no hope of returning to school, and their dreams are fading. Where is the support? #Gaza #Students #Education www.gofundme.com/f/support-al...

jun 22, 2025, 8:30 pm • 0 0 • view

Thanks for writing this! I'm biased, since I wrote the MAA report you cite, but I think you hit the nail on the head with the end result. A reduction in the number of jobs with a discursive claim to expansion even though the person hired cannot empirically do everything the job states. No one can!

dec 13, 2024, 4:27 pm • 14 0 • view

Thank you for writing that report!! And for these thoughts, it is both maddening and validating to have my suspicions echoed

dec 13, 2024, 4:28 pm • 4 0 • view

I've been more cautious in stating similar ideas in the reports, since they are a different genre. But look at who gets hired - which I haven't publicly done but the answer backs up what you say here - to see what happens. Its part of a broader phenomenon that is quite clear in other fields too.

dec 13, 2024, 4:43 pm • 3 0 • view

A good ideological goal - people working on more than just northwestern Europe - is pitched to central admin, who support the perspective very often, but also don't want to add TT lines. So you replace one medievalist with another without changing the ballgame.

dec 13, 2024, 4:43 pm • 6 0 • view

Oh this is EXCELLENT, I wish I'd had this to reference a few months ago when I was (poorly) articulating my own issues with how the GMA gets deployed particularly within institutional contexts!! Glad to have this piece (and the others!) to refer to now!

dec 13, 2024, 4:52 pm • 7 0 • view

oooh I should read yours too!!

dec 13, 2024, 5:17 pm • 0 0 • view

It was just a post on tumblr about how medieval lit courses deploy the Global Middle Ages, nothing scholarly! But I wish I'd had this to link to then!

dec 13, 2024, 5:35 pm • 4 0 • view

But ALSO, you can read so many other (smarter, cooler) people's opinions on this, too! Scroll down to the "roundtable" section of UW's beautiful 2024 journal (over 600 pages of incredible wisdom, plus me) to see them all: journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/al...

dec 13, 2024, 3:43 pm • 25 4 • view

And as always, my infinite thanks to @mideastmedieval.bsky.social, which *is* a truly ideal institution, run by incredible humans who help all of their contributors shine and facilitate possibly unprecedented levels of scholarly access to our field.

dec 13, 2024, 3:49 pm • 19 3 • view

Oh, and I also owe a debt of thanks to my colleague @caeliambulator.bsky.social, who offered some late-stage comments that both affirmed and pushed me on this!

dec 13, 2024, 4:23 pm • 12 1 • view

So glad to see this out! Such a wonderful piece!

dec 13, 2024, 6:37 pm • 1 0 • view

Thank you!! And for your earlier attention to it as well!

dec 13, 2024, 6:51 pm • 1 0 • view

📌

aug 20, 2025, 12:38 am • 0 0 • view

Great & thought-provoking piece, thanks for sharing!

dec 13, 2024, 4:53 pm • 2 0 • view

thank you for reading!!

dec 13, 2024, 4:56 pm • 1 0 • view

Glad to see this is out!

dec 13, 2024, 3:56 pm • 2 0 • view

Glad to have it out 😅 it means I can’t fuss with it any more. I have just skimmed yours and I’m excited to read it more deeply later!

dec 13, 2024, 3:59 pm • 2 0 • view

Very, very, very interesting topic. I hope you don't write like an academic. Stuff like this should be accessible to any reasonably educated/well read person. In America, academics often wall themselves off from the reading public linguistically...

jan 21, 2025, 4:32 am • 1 0 • view

I unfortunately write a bit like an academic, I think, mostly because they’re the main audience, but I am also very responsive to questions!

jan 21, 2025, 4:41 am • 0 0 • view

Tell them where to go with it if they complain your style is too pleasant. Your target audience should be everyone with an open-mind & a desire to learn. After all, isn't that why our government spends so much money producing people with higher degrees?

jan 21, 2025, 4:48 am • 1 0 • view

My government spends very little all things considered producing people with my kind of degree! But yes.

jan 21, 2025, 12:56 pm • 0 0 • view

Yes, recently there has been a serious decline in humanities tied largely to an education system controlled by Biz Schools & Elite schools who abandoned great books programs that provided a rigorous intro to world history, thought & literature. We need rigorous core curricula back so kids learn

jan 21, 2025, 8:28 pm • 1 0 • view

to understand how the world got here, how to evaluate & argue their own & others viewpoints & how to think clearly & accurately about the world around them no matter thier ultimate career. My youngest is at my alma now. It's pathetic how bad the education is at most of the top schools now.

jan 21, 2025, 8:28 pm • 1 0 • view

(really, it does, the US spends almost twice as much per gdp as the next closest country.) I'm sure it will be fine for me, but I make ironic jokes about deconstrctionist literary theory & post-Frankfurt neo-marxist critical theory. Besides, your topic has very broad appeal (relatively speaking)

jan 21, 2025, 4:48 am • 1 0 • view

diminishing the opportunity to develop a class of public intellectuals like you find in most other developed countries. The few we have are like Steve Pinker & Carl Sagen, caricatures of what a serious intellectual would be.

jan 21, 2025, 4:32 am • 1 0 • view

Thanks for this! A few thoughts 1) the "global" as performative consciousness raising for Europeanists, agreed! 2) Eurocentrism (rather than Anglocentrism) is probably aspirational for much of the American academy. 3) I think a lot could be solved by just having a more expansive view of the "West".

dec 14, 2024, 8:03 pm • 2 0 • view

interesting! to point 3) expansive in the sense of just having Europe mean more for people than Britain, France, Germany, or expansive in the sense of Brian Catlos's 'Islam is Western' type outlook?

dec 14, 2024, 8:05 pm • 1 0 • view

Definitely the latter, though having more of a cultural-historical sense of "Europe" as actually encompassing something like "the traditions and cultures that existed in the geographic area known as Europe" would be great, too.

dec 14, 2024, 8:11 pm • 1 0 • view

Yeah I think I'm more a proponent of the former to get to the latter, if that makes sense

dec 14, 2024, 8:12 pm • 1 0 • view

It does. I think I was trying to get at something similar in my "Eurocentrism" comment, i.e., does this Europe have places like Istanbul and Granada in it? I do think a lot of the "global" really just fits into this more expansive "West", though.

dec 14, 2024, 8:16 pm • 2 0 • view

YEP

dec 14, 2024, 8:17 pm • 1 0 • view

📌

dec 23, 2024, 7:29 pm • 1 0 • view

📌

dec 14, 2024, 2:50 am • 1 0 • view

This is a nice piece. Thank you.

dec 13, 2024, 5:21 pm • 2 0 • view

thanks for reading!

dec 13, 2024, 5:22 pm • 1 0 • view

I’ve been dealing with these issues as I try to update old courses and create new ones. I obviously knew that I couldn’t actually teach a GMA course on my own, but I do want to get beyond Western Europe.

dec 13, 2024, 5:26 pm • 2 0 • view

I get that! My concern is less with the teaching one-off courses problem and more with the publishing and hiring.

dec 13, 2024, 5:34 pm • 7 0 • view

Specifically, you can likely source better work from actual specialists for your syllabus than from “GMA” dabbler europeanists.

dec 13, 2024, 5:35 pm • 16 0 • view

(Though this work will therefore not be tagged “global,” and almost certainly not “medieval” either—happy to help if you need MENA/Islam focused ideas!)

dec 13, 2024, 5:38 pm • 8 0 • view

I appreciate that! It’s one thing to assign e.g., Ibn Fadlan as a “globalizing” figure or touch-point, but quite another to get up to speed on where the field/s is/are.

dec 13, 2024, 5:41 pm • 3 0 • view

Indeed. In my case, I “get to” become a dabbler Europeanist, which I’m not quite sure how to handle.

dec 13, 2024, 5:37 pm • 1 0 • view

Great piece, Rachel!

dec 13, 2024, 5:48 pm • 2 0 • view

thank you! (I'm sweating thinking of certain folks reading it...)

dec 13, 2024, 5:49 pm • 2 0 • view

Just read this. Fantastic.

jan 10, 2025, 12:24 pm • 2 0 • view

Thank you!!

jan 10, 2025, 1:41 pm • 1 0 • view

📌

dec 14, 2024, 2:05 am • 1 0 • view

📌

dec 14, 2024, 10:03 pm • 1 0 • view

📌

aug 26, 2025, 1:53 pm • 0 0 • view

I would love to have a chat about this with you (we’re developing a medieval minor with a genuine trans-regional scope) but, in lieu of that, this piece is amazing and helpful!

dec 13, 2024, 6:58 pm • 5 0 • view

Thank you so much! And I would be happy to chat any time, honestly. I know the piece is salty but I can be nice.

dec 13, 2024, 6:59 pm • 1 0 • view

Have you seen this? alpheratzmag.com/experience/2...

jun 10, 2025, 8:34 pm • 1 0 • view

This is a great piece, I hadn’t seen it!! Thank you!

jun 10, 2025, 8:44 pm • 0 0 • view

Oof, Rachel, this is a fantastic piece. I’m quite obviously on the Eurocentric side of scholarship, & an early modernist to boot, but boy was I nodding and mmhmmming while reading. So thankful this piece exists!

dec 13, 2024, 6:12 pm • 3 0 • view

Thank you so much!! I really appreciate it ☺️

dec 13, 2024, 6:13 pm • 0 0 • view