“In 2011, the University of California at Los Angeles wrecked its English major,” begins Heather Mac Donald’s devastating takedown of modern American higher education that appeared in the January 3 Wall Street Journal. (I’d link to it, but it’s behind a paywall.) “Until 2011,” she explains,
“…students majoring in English at UCLA had to take one course in Chaucer, two in Shakespeare, and one in Milton —the cornerstones of English literature. Following a revolt of the junior faculty, however, during which it was announced that Shakespeare was part of the ‘Empire,’ UCLA junked these individual author requirements. It replaced them with a mandate that all English majors take a total of three courses in the following four areas: Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability and Sexuality Studies; Imperial, Transnational, and Postcolonial Studies; genre studies, interdisciplinary studies, and critical theory; or creative writing.”
Her best line comes a couple of paragraphs later: “Sitting atop an entire civilization of aesthetic wonders, the contemporary academic wants only to study oppression, preferably his or her own, defined reductively according to gonads and melanin.”
Robert McHenry, a former editor of Encyclopædia Britannica, has his own thoughts—and a theory—about the kerfuffle here.
