Colleges Should Stop Teaching Courses Fundies Don't Agree With

What's the difference between a science major, an engineering major, and an English major? An engineering major asks, "How does it work?" A science major asks "Why does it work?" An English major asks "Do you want fries with that?"

Haha, okay, I kid, I kid. Please don't throw harpoons at me; I majored in Political Science, so I really don't have much standing to wisecrack.

Anyway, I thought the implication behind this joke was what Phyllis Schlafly would be talking about when she wrote Advice To College Students: Don't Major In English for the Christian Worldview Network.

But I forgot--this is the CWN we're talking about, and the star of the early 80's hit TV show, Phyllis Schlafly in the 18th Century! Apparently there are things far worse than economic realities. There's librul indocktrinashun!

The bad news is that Shakespeare has disappeared from required courses in English departments at more than three-fourths of the top 25 U.S. universities, but the good news is that only 1.6 percent of America's 19 million undergraduates major in English (according to Department of Education figures).

Is that right? Well, do those colleges no longer teach Shakespeare at all, or simply not require it?

When I visit college campuses, students for years have been telling me that the English departments are the most radicalized of all departments, more so than sociology, psychology, anthropology, or even women's studies.

You talk to college students? Even the females?

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.

Oh, ha ha ha! That's hilarious, Phyllis! Seung-Hui Cho (as he preferred to be called) probably learned to be crazy in ENG 101: How To Kill Lots of People. Too bad he didn't read nice, calming literature like Hamlet, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Titus Andronicus, and Romeo and Juliet, where no violence happens, ever.

Incidentally, way to knock English majors. I've had two roommates in the last five years who were English majors. I wonder how many shooting rampages they've gone on.

In the decades before "progressive" education became the vogue, English majors were required to study Shakespeare, the preeminent author of English literature. The premise was that students should be introduced to the best that has been thought and said.

You say that is if it were some kind of irrefutable fact, instead of merely your opinion. While I don't disagree that Shakespeare was important, how can he be "the preeminent author of English literature" if English scholars are removing his work from required curricula?

Do you suppose there's some chance that Shakespeare was so important simply because we always assumed he was?

What happened? To borrow words from Hamlet: "Though this be madness, yet there is method in it." Universities deliberately 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."

Good lord, no! What makes you people think we should listen to fresh ideas and under-represented cultures? Don't you know everything important was done by rich, heterosexual, Christian white men?

When the classics are assigned, they are victims of the academic fad called deconstructionism. That means: pay no mind to what the author wrote or meant; deconstruct him and construct your own interpretation, as in a Vanderbilt University course called "Shakespearean Sexuality," or "Chaucer: Gender and Genre" at Hamilton College.

Gee, Phyllis, maybe instead of bashing them, you should try taking the courses? After all, there might be something educational in them that you might not have known before!

Nah, that's stupid. Those ideas are new and non-mainstream, and are therefore automatically false! There's no sexual innuendo in the bard's work! (And Phyllis, if you really think that, whoever taught you Shakespeare needs to be sued.)

The facts about what universities are teaching English majors were exposed this year by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA).

That link goes to a bunch of reports by ACTA. You can read them if you want, but they're all really long, boring, and pointless. The one about Shakespeare simply parrots back the "horrifying" conclusion that Phyllis is presenting here.

English majors are offered a potpourri of worthless courses.

Oh really? Let's check out these "worthless" courses. Remember, Phyllis: you can only cite courses that have supplanted Shakespeare as required offerings!

...

Hm, that was a short list. Okay, then, let's see what elective courses we have.

Some English department courses are really sociology or politics.

Uh, well, no?

I think what Philbert is really trying to say here is that English classes teach that there are works of literature that cover social or political topics, which, as we all know, is unacceptable.

Examples are "Gender and Sociopolitical Activism in 20th Century Feminist Utopias" at Macalester College; "Of Nags, Bitches and Shrews: Women and Animals in Western Literature" at Dartmouth College; and "African and Diasporic Ecological Literature" at Bates College.

Hm, what do you know? Sounds like there's literature around the world that delves into politics and social issues! Too bad we can't teach about that, because that would violate Phyllis Schlafly's Laws of English Courses.

Many undergraduate courses focus on extremely specialized subjects of interest only to the professor who is trying to "publish or perish," but of virtually no value to students.

You mean like my first-semester calculus class? I don't know about you folks, but I can't remember the last time I needed to derive a function, or whatever the hell it was we did.

Anyway, let's get back to the topic at hand, where Phyllis was about to helpfully tell us what we don't need to learn:

Examples are: "Beast Culture: Animals, Identity, and Western Literature" at the University of Pennsylvania; and "Food and Literature" at Swarthmore College.

If you're interested, here's the description of that course from UPenn's web site. What kind of fascist-commie pinko shit are they teaching? I've never heard of that filth! Gulliver's Travels? Robinson Crusoe? Who needs that stuff? (No mention of Animal Farm, though, strangely enough.)

Some English departments offer courses in pop culture. Examples are: "It's Only Rock and Roll" at the University of California at San Diego; "Animals, Cannibals, Vegetables" at Emory University; "Cool Theory" at Duke University; and "The Cult of Celebrity: Icons in Performance, Garbo to Madonna" at the University of Pennsylvania.

Yes, God forbid students take a course or two that might be fun. And I'm sure none of those colleges teach Shakespeare at all!

What's this? No general education requirements? All they have to take is those BS courses to graduate? Whee! Isn't making shit up fun?

Of course, English professors now love to teach about sex. Examples are: "Shakesqueer" at American University; "Queer Studies" at Bates College; "Promiscuity and the Novel" at Columbia University; and "Sexing the Past" at Georgetown University.

I'm not sure what "Shakesqueer" and "Queer studies" have to do with "teaching about sex." You do realize there's more to homosexuality than just butt-thumping, don't you Phyllis? (By the way..."Shakesqueer?" Weren't you complaining that you wanted more Shakespeare being taught just a minute ago, or does that only apply to the kind of Shakespeare you want taught?)

The other two courses do sound a little more like they're about sex, but still...how can you blame them? With the importance that sexuality plays in our culture, I can't imagine why you would want students NOT to study it.

Some English-department courses really belong in a Weirdo department. Examples are: "Creepy Kids in Fiction and Film" at Duke University, which focuses on "weirdoes, creeps, freaks, and geeks of the truly evil variety";

What's wrong with that class? Are we now not supposed to study deviant characters either? Phyllis, why don't you just make up a list of everything that we're allowed to learn, and I'll pass it around to colleges, okay?

"Bodies of the Middle Ages: Embodiment, Incarnation, Practice" at Cornell University; "The Conceptual Black Body in Twentieth-Century and Contemporary Visual Culture" at Mount Holyoke College; and "Folklore and the Body" at Oberlin College.

I don't really know what any of those courses teach. The titles are pretty ambiguous, but I'm sure Phyllis has researched them thoroughly, so she knows perfectly well what they're about, and they fall on her "verboten" list. I'm also sure that she has perfectly valid reasons for not telling us what they're about, so stop asking!

Replacing the classics with authors of children's literature is now common. Assigned readings for college students include Dr. Seuss, J.K. Rowling, The Wizard of Oz, and Snow White.

Wow, this is even worse. This time, there aren't even any class names! Just a list of things college students are studying that they apparently shouldn't! Apparently Grimm's Fairy Tales are on her "no-no" list (probably because they contain violence and sex), along with The Wizard of Oz and Harry Potter, which, as we all know, have absolutely no literary merit or cultural influence.

Now what about Dr. Seuss? What a pity kids have to read Dr. Seuss in college! I once dated a woman who had to read chidren's books in a grad course. Because she was studying to be...wait for it...an elementary school teacher!!!

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.

Yeah, why don't those unimportant women and minorities just step aside and leave the hard work to the menfolk? Just the untalented ones, though. As determined by Phyllis Schlafly.

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).

So...you're...basically just coming right out and saying it? You only want us to learn stuff by Dead White European Males? I don't even need to do anything; the jokes just write themselves!

Leftwing academics (often called tenured radicals) eagerly spread the message, and 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.

NNNOOOOO!!!! The multiculturalists are coming! Whatever will we do???? Our power structure built on the oppression of the poor is crumbling!!!!

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...

I guess we shouldn't view everything through "lenses." Who cares what women, minorities, and poor people think? If they were important, they wouldn't be oppressed!

...based on the assumption that America is a discriminatory and unjust racist and patriarchal society.

Are you going to try and argue that it's not? Or simply that it is, and that's okay?

The only good news is that students seldom read books any more and use Cliffs Notes for books they may be assigned.

Oh ho ho! That's a good one! At least students aren't learning too much of what I don't want them to!

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: don't waste your scarce college dollars on a major in English.

That's nice. Nobody asked ACTA what they think, and nobody told students they couldn't study Shakespeare.

But if Phyllis really wants us to stop reading works by minorities and women, I guess I can agree to that. Let's start with her.

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In doing some research for this piece, I stumbled across some other blogs that have also tackled Phyllis and her inane rantings. If you want, you can check them out here, here, and here.