For his presentation on the second chapter of the second part of Don Quixote, a student wrote two sonnets. In Spanish. Of his own free will, obviously. I don’t ask people to write poetry.

My class on Cervantes is the best-enrolled of all our highest-level seminars in the past 14 years (and maybe before but I wasn’t here then). This is a response to those who say that students aren’t interested in reading the Old Masters and are bored by complicated works of literature. It’s simply not true that students want gimmicky courses that are easy. We have weekly writing assignments and two essays in the Cervantes course. And I’m a very harsh grader.

We do have wordplay in Ukraine, of course. One great example is the Ukrainian movie streaming service named Takflix, which is wordplay on Netflix. In Russian “net” means “no.” And in Ukrainian, “tak” means “yes.” So the service is named “yesflix” in Ukrainian.

People have no understanding of how the system of higher education in their own country works. For instance, there’s a myth about a crowd of unemployable gender studies majors wandering around.

In reality, it’s a rare university that can afford a gender studies major, and those that do have the tiniest number of students. The programs that do graduate crowds of unemployable people are in psychology. A Bachelor’s degree in psychology doesn’t give you the possibility of any sort of clinical practice. The program is pure fluff. Students who can’t succeed in college are syphoned towards it in large numbers to create an illusion of tolerable graduation rates. After graduation, all they can do is go into the kind of jobs that enforce woke compliance. At my university, we have 500+ psych majors and 8 physics majors. And that’s not because there are no jobs in physics or chemistry. Actually, the starting salary for our chemistry graduates is $80,000. They are in high demand. But most of the students who enter the chemistry program fail within the first two semesters and switch not to the non-existent gender studies major but into psych.