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More foolishness that takes us even further away from honest discussion on race relations. But that is the nature of the game today, speaking volumes about why this is so sad.
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.
This is really just a highbrow version of lazy left-wing writers online grumbling lately that James Bond, a different type of canonical literary figure, should be black or female in future movies. Ace wrote a post marveling at the sheer lack of imagination involved in that. Why not create a new secret agent, he wondered, make him — or her — black, and have them rescue Bond from some predicament? Why insist on coopting Bond when you can do your own thing? The answer, obviously, is because cooptation is the point. Anyone can write a spy movie; anyone can introduce new, diverse characters. Writing the future is easy. Rewriting the past is where the real power is. Why would anyone with enough political power to seize the prestige of some foundational text or character and remake it to promote their agenda prefer to create something new? That’s the sort of thing you might do if you were interested in literature for its own sake. What really interests them about the canon is the question of who enjoys the authority to declare what’s canonical. Why not adult babies all of 20 years old?
I’m kind of surprised Trump hasn’t used campus insanity to greater effect on the trail, to be honest. .....s?
They need more time in school before reaching college. Then they might have heard of Phillis Wheatley, Anne Spencer, or James Weldon Johnson.
:shrug: I like poetry...
At least if its college students they are generally just wasting their own or their parents' money.
It is dangerous for a woman to defy the gods;
To taunt them with the tongue's thin tip,
Or strut in the weakness of mere humanity,
Or draw a line daring them to cross;
The gods own the searing lightning,
The drowning waters, tormenting fears
And anger of red sins.
Anne Spencer
Let the kids do what they like and flunk them, if they don't know enough.
I see what what you're saying, but teachers can't flunk the students without the parents of those students getting angry and saying it's the teacher's fault that the kids aren't learning.
Kids today are precious little princes and princesses, that's how they're parents see them, and that's why they feel like they can tell their teachers how to teach the class.
Then let the parents pay enough to go to a school with a curriculum that their kids like. But it seems better for the school to teach, what employer will be willing to employ.
Then let the parents pay enough to go to a school with a curriculum that their kids like. But it seems better for the school to teach, what employer will be willing to employ.
It is a poetry class, they are not gaining employable skills anyways.
Neither is African American studies. Should we nix that?
You could. I am fine with having it as long as someone else whines about the under representation of White Africans in African American studies.
That really sums it all up joG. I think many schools aren't really teaching useful real world skills to college students. Instead they focus on a lot of political material, and emphasizing things like "white privilege" and "societal racism". Minority kids hear this stuff and think the world is out to get them.
Imo, colleges should focus more on preparing students for what they'll face once they graduate college, such as high competition for jobs, the shrinking of the middle class, loss of good paying jobs, rising rents, etc.
The problem is that professors are highly paid, but don't really compete in life the way most employed people do. So they can teach a lot of theories and rhetoric that actually is putting kids at a disadvantage.
I have no idea why these kind of folks go to schools like Yale.
I feel bad for the school administration.
Do you understand what REAL colleges and Universities are for?
They teach various AREAS of study in the Sciences, Arts, and Social Sciences. Colleges give you a general degree. Universities give you a FOCUS.
If you are trying to get a degree in Literature it's not supposed to be geared toward teaching you about all those "survival skills" you list. Not for the DEGREE anyway.
Colleges and University have electives that can help with that. But you were already supposed to be learning that from life experience; by getting a starting job, learning to socialize with other people (not video/snap/text/chat!), or going to some vocational school. High school is supposed to teach one the very basics. College is where you work on your interests in hopes it will lead to a life career.
The OP is correct. The kids are wasting their time and everyone's money trying to get a degree with as little effort as possible by these B/S diversionary tactics.
Get your damn degree, prove you KNOW your stuff, then you can suggest teaching such "new areas" yourself.
They need more time in school before reaching college. Then they might have heard of Phillis Wheatley, Anne Spencer, or James Weldon Johnson.
:shrug: I like poetry...
At least if its college students they are generally just wasting their own or their parents' money.
It is dangerous for a woman to defy the gods;
To taunt them with the tongue's thin tip,
Or strut in the weakness of mere humanity,
Or draw a line daring them to cross;
The gods own the searing lightning,
The drowning waters, tormenting fears
And anger of red sins.
Anne Spencer
That really sums it all up joG. I think many schools aren't really teaching useful real world skills to college students. Instead they focus on a lot of political material, and emphasizing things like "white privilege" and "societal racism". Minority kids hear this stuff and think the world is out to get them.
Imo, colleges should focus more on preparing students for what they'll face once they graduate college, such as high competition for jobs, the shrinking of the middle class, loss of good paying jobs, rising rents, etc.
The problem is that professors are highly paid, but don't really compete in life the way most employed people do. So they can teach a lot of theories and rhetoric that actually is putting kids at a disadvantage.
As long as they're not demanding white males be eliminated from the curriculum, I don't understand why this is a problem.
As long as they're not demanding white males be eliminated from the curriculum, I don't understand why this is a problem.
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