Michael Rectenwald


Michael Rectenwald is an American scholar who has taught at several institutions, most notably at New York University. Although his scholarship has focused primarily on 19th-century British secularism, contemporary secularism, and the 19th-century freethought movement, he may be best known as a critic of the contemporary social justice movement and its effects in the academy, as he describes in his memoir, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage, published in 2018.

Early life and education

Rectenwald's 2018 memoir records that he was the seventh of nine children born. He grew up in a Catholic German-American family on the north side of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
A graduate of North Catholic High School in 1977, Rectenwald's undergraduate studies in English included a close apprenticeship with Beat Generation poet Allen Ginsberg at Naropa University during the 1979–80 school year. He graduated cum laude from the University of Pittsburgh in 1983 with a B.A. in English literature. In 1997, Case Western Reserve University awarded Rectenwald a master's degree in English literature. In 2004, Carnegie Mellon University conferred upon Rectenwald a Ph.D. in literary and cultural studies. He was recognized by Carnegie Mellon as among its top-performing graduates, when in the span of one year, he published three books.

Academic career

Rectenwald has taught at universities since 1993, including at Case Western Reserve University, Carnegie Mellon University, Duke University, North Carolina Central University, and New York University, where he was a Professor of Liberal and Global Liberal Studies for more than ten years before retiring in January 2019.
Rectenwald has authored numerous articles for popular magazines and scholarly journals, as well as nine books, including Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom, Springtime for Snowflakes: “Social Justice” and Its Postmodern Parentage, Nineteenth-Century British Secularism: Science, Religion and Literature, Academic Writing, Real World Topics, and Global Secularisms in A Post-Secular Age . His academic essays have appeared in The British Journal for the History of Science, Endeavour, and the Cambridge University Press anthology George Eliot In Context, among others.

Research contributions

Rectenwald has written extensively on the origins of the movement called secularism, which was founded in London in 1851 by George Jacob Holyoake. Rectenwald's research has established that secularism was a significant cultural and philosophical source for agnosticism, and for the emerging new creed of "scientific naturalism” propounded by Thomas Henry Huxley, John Tyndall, Herbert Spencer, and others. Scientific naturalism is noteworthy for being the philosophical basis of "the Darwinian circle," i.e., the 19th century scientists of note most responsible for the general acceptance of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution via natural selection.
Rectenwald argues in "Secularism and the cultures of nineteenth-century scientific naturalism," published in The British Journal for the History of Science in June 2013: "Not only did early Secularism help clear the way by fighting battles with the state and religious interlocutors, but it also served as a source for what Huxley, almost twenty years later, termed 'agnosticism'...In Holyoake's Secularism we find the beginnings of the mutation of radical infidelity into the respectability necessary for the acceptance of scientific naturalism, and also the distancing of later forms of infidelity incompatible with it. Holyoake's Secularism represents an important early stage of scientific naturalism."
In his book, Nineteenth-Century British Secularism: Science, Religion and Literature, Rectenwald applies the conception of secularity as developed by philosopher Charles Taylor in A Secular Age to 19th-century Great Britain. The book is interdisciplinary, with chapters treating the secular antipodes Richard Carlile and Thomas Carlyle, the geology of Charles Lyell, the significance of George Jacob Holyoake's secularism, the emergence of scientific naturalism, the religiosity and secularity of the Newman brothers and the postsecularism of the novel Daniel Deronda by George Eliot.
In Holyoake's Secularism, Rectenwald locates a precursor for Charles Taylor’s version of secularity as the immanent frame that structures the conditions of belief and unbelief in modernity. According to a review in Victorian Studies, "Rectenwald thus offers a revisionist interpretation that, rather than understanding Holyoake's leadership of the free thought movement as a failed rhetorical attempt to make society more secular, sees it as marking a distinct moment in modernity."

Critique of social justice and leftism in academia

@antipcnyuprof Twitter account

On September 12, 2016, Rectenwald created the Twitter account @antipcnyuprof and began tweeting criticisms of what he saw as excesses of political correctness and social justice ideology on North American colleges and universities. He was discovered by a student reporter for the Washington Square News, New York University's weekly student newspaper. He subsequently gave an interview and revealed himself as the NYU faculty member behind the @antipcnyuprof Twitter handle.
Within two days, he was called in to the dean's office, and was offered a paid leave of absence, which he has argued that he was strongly encouraged to accept, though this has been publicly refuted.
UPDATE 11/11: Email Correspondence between Professor Michael Rectenwald and Dean Fred Schwarzbach. November 11, 2016. An open letter from the “Liberal Studies Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Working Group” addressed him in the Washington Square News. Following interviews with numerous media outlets,
Rectenwald responded to the committee's response after returning from leave in the 2017 spring semester. Rectenwald retired in January 2019.

NYU cancels Yiannapoulos event

On October 30, 2018, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio requested that NYU cancel an in-class lecture on Halloween and political correctness that was to be delivered the next day by Rectenwald's guest, the controversial British polemicist Milo Yiannopoulos. The mayor cited concerns about the availability of the New York City Police Department to perform security duties at NYU during the same time they would be needed to police New York's Village Halloween Parade. NYU complied with the mayor's request.

''Springtime for Snowflakes''

In 2018, the New English Review Press published Rectenwald's memoir, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage. Rectenwald recounts his academic career and his intellectual evolution. He critiques the contemporary social justice culture in the academy, arguing that it is rooted in socialist and postmodernist thought and describing its constituent concepts such as deconstruction, belief in toxic masculinity, social constructivism, and radical constructivism. Rectenwald concludes that such ideology has promoted an authoritarian and dogmatic culture in parts of the academy.

Works

Books