The College Fix

Great writing is above the political fixations of modern progressivism

Yale University recently implemented a moderately redesigned English program deigned to better reflect diversity, inclusiveness, multiculturalism—something, anyway, it’s not entirely clear. The redesign comes after a student petition that claimed Yale’s program “actively harmed” the students who had to take it, because “the literary contributions of women, people of color, and queer folk” were absent from it. Yale responded—sort of—by rejiggering the literature requirements of the major so that students could successfully avoid taking any courses that focused on Shakespeare. Voilà: English students at one of the preeminent universities on the planet can now graduate without studying the world’s greatest writer. So that’s a victory. I guess.

In truth, the students have a grain of a point, inasmuch as any literature canon worth its salt will by design contain more than just white men, who are of course not the only good or the only important writers worth studying. But nothing in the academy is ever so simple as that; rather than simply point out that it might be able to do with some modest expansion, student-activists must claim that the program “actively harms” students because they don’t get to read certain authors.

Much of the problems with modern campus activism is a problem of scale: students are incapable of judging the difference between a minor quibble and a major problem. In this case, the petitioners at Yale mistook the former for the latter, believing that a program with some shortcomings was in fact an actively deleterious force in students’ lives. This is silly and useless. It is tempting to suggest that, upon graduating, these types of students are going to discover that the real world is not so patient with this kind of hysterical overreach—-though in all honestly American corporate culture seems to be increasingly primed to tolerate this kind of nonsense, so maybe that’s wrong.

All of that aside, just marvel at the quiet absurdity of this: one of the most prestigious institutions of higher learning in human history will now let its English students pass through its halls without studying Shakespeare. This is a quiet, discreet, yet still bizarre and inexplicable development in American higher education. Maybe Yale’s English program is less “harmful” than it was before. But it is surely of less quality.

MORE: U. Penn students remove Shakespeare portrait, replace it with black lesbian feminist poet

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