If you're taking on $50,000 a year of student debt, you better be majoring in something other than English...
Posted on 09/14/2015 8:24:21 AM PDT by Academiadotorg
The John William Pope Center’s Jay Schalin recently published a report detailing the decline of America’s college English departments. More and more, traditional English literature classes and other similar icons of the English language in academia are disappearing. Many of them are replaced, or supplemented by, “digital humanities,” “media studies” and the like.
Schalin used the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as an example, where requirements have vastly changed between 1988 and 2014. Four specific literature courses were mandatory prior to graduation, ranging from studying T.S. Eliot to Chaucer to William Shakespeare in the 1988-89 school year. But, by 2014-15, only one literature course is mandatory at UNC, either a literature course from Chaucer to Pope or one specifically about Shakespeare.
English majors at UNC have to take courses from several time periods, but instead of focusing on literature, some of the course titles are “Medieval and Modern Arthurian Romance” or “Renaissance Women Writers,” and “Southern Women Writers.” An additional course, “Another Country: Homoeroticism in British Literature,” is an option for one of the latter time periods required by the university, which does not include electives such as “The Challenge of Queer Theory to Literary Studies,” “Children’s Picture Books,” and “Latina Feminisms.”
(Excerpt) Read more at academia.org ...
Who cares about a bunch of old dead white guys...
Some of these electives are not bad as electives. The Southern literary movement is worth studying, as is any aspect of Renaissance lit. But so are writers like Eliot (a personal favorite), Chaucer, and so many others. There are some great modern writers too. If you also want to study “Southern Women Writers”, go for it.
I was an English major and learned about all kinds of literature. We also had to take writing courses. And structure courses. (8 AM. Ugh.)
I had to do a senior thesis and oral panels on a completely different writer.
But understanding the Western literary tradition, especially the Anglo-American literary tradition, might inculcate the traditions of the American experience in particular and the Anglosphere in general into students, and then they won’t be good little robots.
Not to worry—not the way they “deconstruct” it!
“Four specific literature courses were mandatory prior to graduation”
I hated that nonsense, except the number of cute chicks increased at each class. Damn mandatory too for 16 credits. Until now, I had no clue how Rudyard Kipling was related to my Business major unless he wrote a poem on financial analytics.
The latest fad - especially at the most elite of these institutions - is the abolition of freshman English, along with college-level instruction in grammar and composition. Instead, entering students take “freshman seminars” (or, excuse me, “first-year seminars”), taught mostly by non-English Department faculty, including large numbers in math, the sciences, the arts, and the social sciences - as part of this approach, these folks are supposed to insure that freshman develop college level writing skills.
This frees up the English faculty to focus their attention on their professional studies, on things like the travails of the post-colonial transgendered in the clutches of an uncaring patriarchy.
English Department —
Sounds like MicroAgression
If you're taking on $50,000 a year of student debt, you better be majoring in something other than English...
We are seeing the effects of a generation or two that have been nudged away from the classics. I have seen students from a private schools that still mandate reading classics and some students from public schools who read tripe about homosexual identity yada yada and I can say there is no intellect comparison. Private school kids are higher on the intellect, critical thinking, and reasoning scale.
Reading literature, no matter your degree plan, makes you smarter.
There’s a ‘Greta Garbo Home for Wayward Apostrophes’ joke there somewhere.
Sadly, even some more subtle distinctions (like that between “insure” and “ensure”) have also been lost in the shuffle, at least for some of us (mea culpa).
It isn’t nonsense — and while Kipling can be enjoyable, he has no literary merit worthy of college study.
People with no education in the liberal arts will be the first to be enslaved.
Email. Thornton: What's your favorite subject?
Bubbles: Poetry.
Thornton: Really? Well, maybe you can help me straighten out my Longfellow.
After all, you wouldn’t want to learn to organize ideas into a persuasive argument.
Not to worry—not the way they “deconstruct” it!
And yet they’re surprised people are voting with their feet?
The Trivium - Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric in K-12 makes for a terrific post secondary foundation.
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