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.
Clarissa's Blog 
I’ve been in on these conversations as my department tries to revise its curriculum and it involves painful choices–and for once it’s not because of the declining job market. The problem is NOT that there are no specialists to teach these fields, it’s that the specialists want to structure the requirements in a way that guarantees enrollments in their classes. And a set of course requirements that makes everyone in the department happy can leave undergraduates little room to follow their interests and take more than one course in an area that interests them. The compromises involve things like requiring two courses in pre-1800 literature, which can be fulfilled by taking the course on Chaucer AND the course on Narratives of Empire, 1500 – 1800, or recognizing that the scholars teaching Shakespeare are often also teaching about gender and sexuality so that a “Gender” requirement can be fulfilled by a Shakespeare class. But of course the point that the study of and appreciation for literature has changed since Berlioz saw a Shakespeare play in 1827 gets lost on columnists with a bone to pick.
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Ah, so it’s a power play between professors. I didn’t think of that possibility. 🙂 And this is why I’m hopeless at departmental politics.
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Exactly. I had all of that and more as an undergraduate and graduate.
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That article is an extended identity politics dog whistle against a strawman.
The actual requirements are here.
In addition to taking these courses, they also have to take 4 historical courses covering four periods from 1500-present. A quick look at the pdfs shows they MUST take Chaucer, Shakespeare or Milton.
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Jesus, so that journalist wrote that endless piece . . . for nothing?
I will never stop being shocked by the idiocy of mainstream journalists.
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This journalist apparently works for a right wing think tank and the original link is from a publication funded by the same. She is a rich person affirmative action baby judging from the fact she went from Phillip Andover to Yale to Cambridge to Stanford, allegedly earned a B.A., a masters and a J.D, and yet cannot properly read a syllabus written for an undergraduate while throwing around multiple classical references in a jeremiad against the decline of the Canon.
Schuman, as you know, demolished her, and all she could do was get caught up in her minutiae in response.
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“Schuman, as you know, demolished her, and all she could do was get caught up in her minutiae in response.”
– No, I don’t know. WTF, I feel like I’ve missed everything in the world! This is what happens to people who get buried in their research.
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Nicely put!
(Yet another reason to value a solid humanities education: it teaches students to track back to original sources, so they can recognize shoddy journalism when they see it.)
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Well, I had a lot of fun in my (Beowulf) / Chaucer / Shakespeare / Milton class as an undergraduate. Milton was a bit of a heavy read, but the rest are for-fun authors.
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“Well, I had a lot of fun in my (Beowulf) / Chaucer / Shakespeare / Milton class as an undergraduate. Milton was a bit of a heavy read, but the rest are for-fun authors.”
– I had the exact same experience. 🙂 Milton was not for me, but (Beowulf) / Chaucer / Shakespeare were fun.
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I didn’t like any of them in high school.
Chaucer (heavily edited/modernized) was closet to something I could get my teeth into but Shakespeare was a like a foreign language (and one i wasn’t especially interested in, like Czech or Polish kids being forced to learn Russian – yeah I can kind of make sense out of it…. can I do something more interesting now?)
Milton was just a major drag, and I actively resented being told I should appreciate him….. brrrrrrrr
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I love reading Chaucer in the original, with only the typography modernized. However, it does take me nearly an hour to read a page of it nowadays.
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