How advanced is the rot? - today's edition

The jackboots at Yale put their West-hatred on full display:

Via Reason’s Robby Soave, who captured the campus activist mindset succinctly in another recent post about insanity at a different school. “The students … seem to think they’re not at college to be educated,” he wrote, but that “they are at college to educate everyone else.”

We have much to learn from these adult babies, my friends.

[W]e oppose the continued existence of the Major English Poets sequence as the primary prerequisite for further study. It is unacceptable that a Yale student considering studying English literature might read only white male authors. 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. The Major English Poets sequences creates a culture that is especially hostile to students of color.

When students are made to feel so alienated that they get up and leave the room, or get up and leave the major, something is wrong. The English department loses out when talented students engaged in literary and cultural analysis are driven away from the major. Students who continue on after taking the introductory sequence are ill-prepared to take higher-level courses relating to race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, ability, or even to engage with critical theory or secondary scholarship. We ask that Major English Poets be abolished, and that the pre-1800/1900 requirements be refocused to deliberately include literatures relating to gender, race, sexuality, ableism, and ethnicity.

It’s time for the English major to decolonize — not diversify — its course offerings.

No request for “dialogue” on campus is complete without a threat — these aren’t really requests, after all, they’re demands — and that comes later in the petition when the English department is warned that they’re “not immune from the collective call to action.” A writer at Slate cited by Soave tried reminding the students that Shakespeare and Milton et al. are canonical for a reason and that to read them is to lay the intellectual foundation on which one’s broader understanding of literature, western and otherwise, is built. But that misses the point. Again: They’re not there to learn. They’re there to teach, and teaching begins with an assertion of authority. (“We have spoken. We are speaking. Pay attention.”) Or maybe I have the cause and effect mixed up. Maybe it’s the assertion of authority that’s important and educating the educators is merely the pretext for asserting it.

Timothy Dwight, call your office.