It turns out that students think I look like Joana Benedek. All the drab, matronly outfits and staid, moth-eaten accoutrements I wear have had zero effect.

Plus the ones on Kindle.

Please forgive me for regaling you with a long quote from an academia-bashing article:

Until 2011, 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 and 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. In other words, the UCLA faculty was now officially indifferent as to whether an English major had ever read a word of Chaucer, Milton, or Shakespeare, but was determined to expose students, according to the course catalog, to “alternative rubrics of gender, sexuality, race, and class.”

What I don’t get is why students can’t have Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton AND Gender, Race, Postcolonial and genre studies. Why does it have to be an either/or situation. I mean, it’s not like it’s hard to hire specialists in all these fields, right?

Or does the problem lie in the austerity measures that are forcing this department to make this sad choice? If, as the article says, this program had 1,400 undergrads (who are probably not all majors, but still), surely this could provide for as many tenure lines as the department could need.

In short, the linked article is textbook strawman argument.