‘Fem Fog’ Fallout: Scholars Wrestle With Honoring a Colleague Tarnished by a Blog Post

Courtesy Allen Frantzen

In 2011 the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies gave a green light to a scholarly collection honoring the work of the celebrated medievalist Allen J. Frantzen. For a scholar of Mr. Frantzen’s prominence, the bestowal of such a collection, known as a Festschrift, is not uncommon.

But the issue got cloudier this year, after a blog post on the scholar’s website decrying the “feminist fog” earned him a widespread rebuke in the medievalist community. Since then, work on the publication has stalled. Three authors who had written essays for the volume have withdrawn their contributions. A few authors decided to add footnotes to their essays, as a way to praise Mr. Frantzen’s contributions to Anglo-Saxon and medieval studies while distancing themselves from what they deemed his offensive remarks.

And a member of the editorial board of Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies — a division of the center, which is affiliated with three universities and based at Arizona State University — resigned after serving on the board for 19 years. That scholar, Diane B. Wolfthal, a professor of art history at Rice University, cited Mr. Frantzen’s blog that “spews sexist nonsense” as the reason for her resignation.

Mr. Frantzen, who retired in 2014 after more than 35 years as a professor at Loyola University Chicago, did not respond to emailed requests for comment for this article. But in January, he told The Chronicle that the controversial post, titled “How to Fight Your Way Out of the Feminist Fog,” was not meant to put women down or claim men are superior, but to suggest that men should be confident enough to develop a critical attitude about feminism.

The post, now taken down, was published in the summer of 2015. In January it surfaced on social media and prompted virtually unanimous consternation from those in the close-knit discipline. It also inspired a widely used hashtag on social media, #femfog, which mocked the idea that a “feminist fog” was oppressing masculinity.

The tortured evolution of Mr. Frantzen’s Festschrift underscores a critical question for scholars: How can they celebrate the work of a pioneer turned pariah?

Footnotes and Withdrawals

Robert E. Bjork, who is director of the Arizona center and has overseen the forthcoming publication, said he was “deeply offended” by what he saw on Mr. Frantzen’s website. But that shouldn’t diminish the value of his prior scholarship, he said, and the publication honoring him should go forward. It is scheduled to be released in 2017.

“I’m sure everybody has friends who are real jerks,” said Mr. Bjork, who identified himself as a feminist and said he had been friends with Mr. Frantzen for more than 20 years. “You must have a friend who is hardly tolerable in some situation, but you’re still that person’s friend.”

Mr. Bjork, a professor of English at Arizona State, went on to compare Mr. Frantzen to the poet Ezra Pound (“I love the poetry … I deplore his politics”) and O.J. Simpson. “I love watching O.J. Simpson play football, the magnificent athlete,” Mr. Bjork said. “I deplore what he’s done, and would not want to be in the same room as the man.”

But Ms. Wolfthal, the scholar who resigned from the editorial board that approved the Festschrift, said it’s difficult to effectively separate a person’s work from his or her politics.

“It’s as if we were saying, Let us honor Donald Trump for his real-estate ability,” she said. “I don’t know that one can separate political views from other spheres of a person’s life. This Allen Frantzen has been quite outspoken in his political views, and we all know what they are, and they’re hurtful and they’re damaging. And to honor him is to look the other way.”

The reactions of scholars who contributed to the volume have ranged from doing nothing to withdrawing their articles. The volume was originally conceived as consisting of contributions from 17 scholars — mostly Mr. Frantzen’s former students. Since January, three authors have withdrawn their works and a couple have added footnotes expressing unease about Mr. Frantzen’s stated views on feminism.

Martin K. Foys, an associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, contributed to the collection after mulling it over. He declined to be interviewed for this article, but described his rationale in an email to The Chronicle and in a footnote he added to his essay for the collection.

“As my dissertation director, Frantzen most vitally taught me not to back down in the face of a position you feel strongly is wrong, but rather to actively counter it with your own,” states his footnote on the essay, “The Undoing of Exeter Book Riddle 47: ‘Bookmoth.’”

“Accordingly,” the note continues, “though it would have been easier to simply retract the essay from this volume, or silently remove my original, honorific footnote, this essay remains in this collection, now both to register publicly my gratitude to Frantzen for everything he has contributed to the field of Anglo-Saxon studies and my own professional development, and equally to note my own personal dismay at the recent positions he has taken that I cannot agree with.”

Two other scholars — Clare A. Lees, a professor of medieval literature at King’s College London, and Gillian R. Overing, a professor of English at Wake Forest University — chose to withdraw a work they had co-authored. They came to that decision “as feminists, Anglo-Saxonists, and medievalists,” Ms. Lees wrote in an email.

A Student’s View

Mary Dockray-Miller, a contributor to the collection and a professor of English at Lesley University, called Mr. Frantzen’s comments “disappointing,” but said she had “only skimmed” his website. Eventually, she said, she changed the first paragraph of her essay to emphasize her personal gratitude to Mr. Frantzen as her dissertation director. She said she had made the change because “a number of colleagues whom I deeply respect were very, very offended” by his comments.

A few months ago, Ms. Dockray-Miller said, she and another of Mr. Frantzen’s graduate students had discussed whether they felt he had treated them differently as female students.

“That student said, ‘No, Allen was pretty equal-opportunity hard on all of us,’” she said. “He was rough. He would say, This is terrible, I don’t even know why you showed this to me. It’s so poorly written.” But, she added: “He did that to everybody: male, female, gay, straight. Everybody.”

In his comments to The Chronicle in January, Mr. Frantzen, who is gay, explained how people tend to assume he is a supporter of feminism because of his sexuality.

To Mr. Bjork, publishing the work is a matter of exercising free speech, not for Mr. Frantzen, but for the people who contributed to collection.

“They want to honor Allen, and they should be allowed to do so without being considered anti-feminist. Not one of them is anti-feminist,” he said. “It concerns me that this whole thing has turned kind of into a witch hunt.”

The editorial board overseeing the publication approved it two weeks ago, by a vote of 5 to 1, with three abstentions, Mr. Bjork said. But, per a compromise involving the editors and contributors, it was decided that the name Allen J. Frantzen would be stripped from the title of the work.