The Humanities and Us

[Valin]

City Journal:

Don’t listen to today’s narcissistic academics—the West’s cultural inheritance is indispensable.

Heather Mac Donald

Winter 2014

 

In 2011, the University of California at Los Angeles decimated its English major. Such a development may seem insignificant, compared with, say, the federal takeover of health care. It is not. What happened at UCLA is part of a momentous shift in our culture that bears on our relationship to the past—and to civilization itself.

 

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.”

 

(Snip)

 

Yet the UCLA English department—like so many others—is more concerned that its students encounter race, gender, and disability studies than that they plunge headlong into the overflowing riches of actual English literature—whether Milton, Wordsworth, Thackeray, George Eliot, or dozens of other great artists closer to our own day. How is this possible? The UCLA coup represents the characteristic academic traits of our time: narcissism, an obsession with victimhood, and a relentless determination to reduce the stunning complexity of the past to the shallow categories of identity and class politics. Sitting atop an entire civilization of aesthetic wonders, the contemporary academic wants only to study oppression, preferably his own, defined reductively according to gonads and melanin. Course catalogs today babble monotonously of group identity. UCLA’s undergraduates can take courses in Women of Color in the U.S.; Women and Gender in the Caribbean; Chicana Feminism; Studies in Queer Literatures and Cultures; and Feminist and Queer Theory.

 

Today’s professoriate claims to be interested in “difference,” or, to use an even more up-to-date term, “alterity.” But this is a fraud. The contemporary academic seeks only to confirm his own worldview and the political imperatives of the moment in whatever he studies. The 2014 Modern Language Association conference, for example, the annual gathering of America’s literature (not social work) faculty, will address “embodiment, poverty, climate, activism, reparation, and the condition of being unequally governed . . . to expose key sites of vulnerability and assess possibilities for change.”

 

(Snip)

[Valin]

Books vs. Literature

Publishers and postmodernism are contributing to the death of the humanities.

Robert McHenry

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

 

If youve been looking in the right places in the past few years, youve encountered fairly regular laments for the death of the humanities, or the liberal arts, or any sort of non-vocational education. And there is much to lament. Recently, Heather Mac Donald, writing in the Wall Street Journal, reminded us that in 2011 the English Department at UCLA decided that their majors no longer need read any Chaucer or Shakespeare or Milton.

 

This is not to say that those writers are not taught; only that they can be sidestepped by the cagey student. The present catalog includes a course on The Canterbury Tales and another in which The Wife of Baths Tale is read (the latter a course focused on dissent in late medieval literature). And there are three courses that focus on Shakespeare: Early, Later, and an introduction to Shakespeare race studies. There is also one on Milton. But all of these can be sidestepped in favor of a course on plays not written by Shakespeare.

 

The prospective English major is directed to take one course from each of three breadth groups: Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability, and Sexuality Studies; Imperial, Transnational, and Postcolonial Studies; and Genre Studies, Interdisciplinary Studies, Critical Theory. (I wondered at first if I had fallen for a parody website, but no.)......(Snip)