Identity Politics: Yale English Majors No Longer Must Read Chaucer or Shakespeare

I was an English Major in college, and I can genuinely say that this is insane:

A year and a half after a petition circulated calling for Yale to “decolonize the English department,” the first students are enrolled in a new course created by the department to increase the breadth of the curriculum and combat claims of departmental racism.

What’s more, new requirements are in place to ensure a more “diversified” slate of courses.

Previous requirements for the major included two courses in “Major English Poets,” including Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton and Eliot, among others. But that two-course series petitioners had deemed actively harmful due to its focus on white male poets. The series is no longer a graduation requirement for Yale’s English majors.

Okay, so a student can graduate from Yale as an English major without ever having read Chaucer or Shakespeare.  That is academic malpractice.  Though the petition has been made private, The College Fix has a quote from the petition.

“A year spent around a seminar table where the literary contributions of women, people of color, and queer folk are absent actively harms all students, regardless of their identity,” it read. The petition even went further, asking the university to do away with these writers once and for all.  “The reconfiguration also did not refocus the program’s pre-1800 and pre-1900 literature requirement to address issues of race, gender, and sexuality as demanded by the petition,” either according to The College Fix.  Though the academic institution didn’t eliminate the white poets altogether — shockingly — they provided some other options for students:

Meanwhile, the newly developed Comparative World English course, which debuted this fall, is taught by English professor Stephanie Newell.

Her research focuses on “the public sphere in colonial West Africa and issues of gender, sexuality, and power as articulated through popular print cultures,” according to her faculty bio.

I know a lot of students who struggled to understand Shakespeare and Chaucer, but they were never harmed by opening a book.  That’s the problem with identity politics — they make everyone a “victim,” denigrate true victimhood, and lower the standard so significantly that now an English degree from Yale will be laughable…  all for the rock bottom price of $66,000.

Ridiculous.

Hat Tip: The College Fix

Image Credit: Static Flickr