As you may have read, English majors at Yale are in rebellion. They have petitioned the department to do away with the Major English Poets, i.e., Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and so on. Yale has long required English majors to read them. (Duh. Physics students are required to know about the atom, too.) And this “creates a culture that is especially hostile to students of color,” say the petitioners. What they want is “literatures relating to gender, race, sexuality, ableism, and ethnicity.”
By the way, Shakespeare “relates” to everything.
Anyway, I wrote a note about this the other day, and now I have done a podcast— a Q&A— with Heather Mac Donald. Readers probably know her as an expert on social policy: policing, immigration, etc. But she is an expert on many other things as well, including English and the know-nothingism that has attacked campuses in recent years. Heather Mac was herself an English major at Yale.
And she tears into the petitioners, and their mindset, as only she can.
Some time ago, I was writing about the refusal of an English teacher in Sacramento to teach Shakespeare to her students, even though Shakespeare was required by the Common Core governing the school. (I’ll pause while readers boo and hiss Common Core.) She said that a “dead white male” could not “speak to” her “diverse” students.
Norman Podhoretz led me to a line in Souls of Black Folk, by W. E. B. DuBois: “I sit with Shakespeare, and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm and arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. … So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America?”
Again, the Q&A with Heather Mac Donald is here.
English Majors in Rebellion at Yale