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Twenty years ago, University of Chicago Professor Allan Bloom achieved best-seller lists and fame with his book The Closing of the American Mind. He dated the change in academic curricula from the 1960s when universities began to abandon the classic works of literature and instead adopt multicultural readings written by untalented, unimportant women and minorities. Bloom's book showed how the Western canon of what educated Americans should know (from Socrates to Shakespeare) was replaced with relativism and the goals of opposing racism, sexism and elitism. Current works promoting multiculturalism written by women and minorities replaced the classics of Western civilization written by the DWEMs (Dead White European Males). Leftwing academics (the tenured radicals) eagerly spread the message. Students at Stanford in 1988 chanted "Hey hey, ho ho, Western civ has got to go." The classicists were cowed into silence, and it's now clear that the multiculturalists won the canon wars. That's why it was no surprise that Cho Seung-Hui, the murderer of 32 students and teachers at Virginia Tech, was an English major. To borrow words from Hamlet: "Though this be madness, yet there is method in it." Universities replaced courses in the great authors of English literature with what professors openly call "fresh concerns," "under-represented cultures," and "ethnic or non-Western literature." Shakespeare has disappeared from required courses in English departments at more than 3/4ths of the top 25 U.S. universities. Shakespeare, Chaucer and Milton have been replaced by living authors who toe the line of multicultural political correctness, i.e., view everything through the lens of race, gender and class based on the assumption that America is a discriminatory and unjust racist and patriarchal society. The facts about what universities are teaching English majors were exposed this year by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA). English majors are offered a potpourri of worthless courses. Some English department courses are really sociology or politics, such as "Gender and Sociopolitical Activism in 20th Century Feminist Utopias" at Macalester College, or "Of Nags, Bitches and Shrews: Women and Animals in Western Literature" at Dartmouth. Many undergraduate courses focus on extremely specialized subjects of interest only to the professor, but of virtually no value to students, such as "Beast Culture: Animals, Identity, and Western Literature" at the University of Pennsylvania, and "Animals, Cannibals, Vegetables" at Emory. Some English departments offer courses in pop culture, such as "It's Only Rock and Roll" at the University of California at San Diego, or about sex, such as "Shakesqueer" at American University or "Queer Studies" at Bates College. Some English-department courses really belong in a Weirdo department, such as "Bodies of the Middle Ages: Embodiment, Incarnation, Practice" at Cornell. ACTA says "a degree in English without Shakespeare is like an M.D. without a course in anatomy. It is tantamount to fraud." College students should be urged to not waste their scarce college dollars on a major in English. |
