Posted on 10/20/2025 1:18:45 PM PDT by karpov
If you really want to understand the horrors of war, don’t just read accounts written years after a battle, but instead read first-hand accounts by soldiers who were on the front lines. Similarly, to understand what has happened in the hostile takeover of American college English departments, it’s best to read a description by a professor who fought to preserve them as places where students are taught to write well by studying books by great authors. Fought and lost. His story is at once enlightening and depressing.
The book at hand is Broken English Departments: The Repair Manual by Reynolds Cotter, a pen name. It tells the author’s tale of earning his Ph.D. so he could teach students about great literature, obtaining a faculty position and tenure at a prestigious state university, and then losing his lonely fight against “progressives” who were determined to reshape the English department to suit their ideological agenda.
Cotter writes that his book “is an English professor’s unsparing analysis of an academic discipline that has lost its way, followed by a blueprint for reevaluating and overhauling English departments in which indoctrinating students about politics has replaced the former responsibility of instructing young people in the skills of effective writing and the achievements of English and American literature.”
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
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I remember being required to take a slightly higher level English course in college, about 1973.
I had to write a paper about the play “Waiting for Godot”.
The play, imho, is nihilistic garbage. I decided to write a paper claiming it was a take-off of the biblical story of Jesus, just to see how I would get graded. As I recall, I got an A.
This was over 50 years ago. My memory never was great, but that is how I remember it.
I was at Yale when Geoffrey Hartman and Harold Bloom were there. They were intellectual giants, but today things are very different.
I liked freshmen english when I went to college. We had to write a lot of essays. The most important thing that the teacher taught me is that the word “that” is not used often enough. “That” should be used more often.
That
/T͟Hat/
pronoun
1.
used to identify a specific person or thing observed by the speaker.
“that’s his wife over there”
2.
referring to a specific thing previously mentioned, known, or understood.
“that’s a good idea”
determiner
1.
used to identify a specific person or thing observed or heard by the speaker.
“look at that man there”
2.
referring to a specific thing previously mentioned, known, or understood.
“he lived in Mysore at that time”
adverb
to such a degree; so.
“I would not go that far”
Interesting anecdote about the teacher encouraging the use of “that” in expository writing. My journalism instructors quickly marked through “that” as usually being wasted in news writing. Similar worlds using the same skill & language yet different.
The root cause, he argues, was the military draft during the Vietnam War. Thousands of young men wanted to avoid conscription, and the easiest way for most was the student deferment.
DeplorablePaul wrote: “I liked freshmen english when I went to college. We had to write a lot of essays.”
I hated freshman english. It was little more than the rules of grammar. no emphasis on the ability to compose an argument just grammar and spelling. There was actually a follow-on with a workbook like the seventh grade.
I experienced this 1st hand in a creative writing 101 prerequisite class.
I defended Thomas Clarence against annita Hill in an essay.
Zero spelling errors, zero punctuation ( and I used every single one in the English language) errors.
The b+ grade ruined my 4.0 16 credit hour semester gpa.
I was marked down for “content”.
Spit.
This was in early 90’s.
I knew then that academia was the marxist gatekeeper of our society.
And my contempt for English Nazis and academia has only grown since.
At least they weren’t teaching grade schools sexual perversion back then, but they are now aren’t they.
Public education must be defunded if our nation is to survive.
Ant look who DIDNT correct those who insist on using a grammatical term , gender, as a biological term !!!
The problem with university faculties is that communists don't have the same culture as the western Christian civilization that is the basis of the university system. There is no respect for the free flow of ideas among communists. So once they get enough power, they cut off any and all opposition and hire according to ideology. This started in the first half of the 20th century with the inflow of Marxists from Europe. They've marched like soldiers through the universities and destroyed many disciplines.
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