College Students: Don't Major in English (Some English Dept. Courses are really Sociology/Politics)

WorldnetDaily ^ | 09/28/2007 | Phyllis Schlafly

[SirLinksalot]

The bad news is that Shakespeare has disappeared from required courses in English departments at more than three-fourths of the top 25 U.S. universities, but the good news is only 1.6 percent of America's 19 million undergraduates major in English, according to Department of Education figures.

When I visit college campuses, students for years have been telling me that the English departments are the most radicalized of all departments, more so than sociology, psychology, anthropology, or even women's studies.

That's why it was no surprise that Cho Seung-Hui, the murderer of 32 students and teachers at Virginia Tech, was an English major.

In the decades before "progressive" education became the vogue, English majors were required to study Shakespeare, the pre-eminent author of English literature. The premise was that students should be introduced to the best that has been thought and said.

What happened? To borrow words from Hamlet: "Though this be madness, yet there is method in it." Universities deliberately replaced courses in the great authors of English literature with what professors openly call "fresh concerns," "under-represented cultures" and "ethnic or non-Western literature."

When the classics are assigned, they are victims of the academic fad called deconstructionism. That means: Pay no mind to what the author wrote or meant; deconstruct him and construct your own interpretation, as in a Vanderbilt University course called "Shakespearean Sexuality," or "Chaucer: Gender and Genre" at Hamilton College.

The facts about what universities are teaching English majors were exposed this year by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. English majors are offered a potpourri of worthless courses.

Some English department courses are really sociology or politics.

Examples are "Gender and Sociopolitical Activism in 20th Century Feminist Utopias" at Macalester College; "Of Nags, Bitches and Shrews: Women and Animals in Western Literature" at Dartmouth College;

[ComputerGuy]

English ranks right up there with Black Studies and Women’s Studies as far as a major is concerned.

[RightWingConspirator]

My wife (BS in Chemistry in 1966) was a tech writer, first for IBM and later for a software startup in Austin, TX. Most of the other tech writers had degrees in English and all of the others were lefties. Almost none of the younger ones could match subjects and verbs correctly, none of them could diagram a sentence and few of them could spell or use spellcheck. The abysmal knowledge that those English majors had of the English language was appalling.

[Triggerhippie]

I was in the abysmally slow registration line between two english majors who didn’t see the humor in the sign over the registrar’s windows that read: “Less Painless Registration!!!”

[Virginia Ridgerunner]

English used to be a very respectable major. No longer, for the reasons outlined in this piece.

[ldakers]

Well, I was an English major at the AF Academy (1992), and I have found it to be invaluable. It gives me a chance to "experience" a wide variety of life experiences without having to live them out personally. It also showed how others dealt with difficult situations, giving me insight into how I might handle them. As an officer, that was a huge benefit in dealing with people. We did> study Shakespeare, though...

[beef]

Q: How do you get an English major off of your front porch?

A: Pay him for the pizza.

[TruthShallSetYouFree]

When I visit college campuses, students for years have been telling me that the English departments are the most radicalized of all departments, more so than sociology, psychology, anthropology, or even women's studies.

That's why it was no surprise that Cho Seung-Hui, the murderer of 32 students and teachers at Virginia Tech, was an English major.

That's nonsense and unworthy of an article that is otherwise on target. Cho's murder rampage had nothing to do with the fact that he was reading PC crap instead of Shakespeare.

[Malacoda]

There are a few (very few) of us who are Right-thinking. Part of the reason I think we get eclipsed by our screeching lefty colleagues is the fact that we actually teach what we're supposed to teach -- grammar, et al -- rather than turning or classrooms in to bully pulpits.

I'm lucky enough to be teaching at a small, Catholic university. I count my blessings every day.

[GovernmentShrinker]

Trying to connect this with Virginia Tech is ludicrous. The English department there had tried to get rid of Cho, but was blocked from doing so by the administration and our assinine laws; they did the best they were allowed to, and took him out of class and tutored him privately. The engineering department would have run into exactly the same wall if they’d deemed Cho to be incompatible with their academic program. As for the fact that Cho got into Virginia Tech in the first place, the blame for that needs to be laid with the public high school and middle school and elementary school that he attended, all of which failed to get this obviously seriously mentally ill kid out of a regular school program and into some kind of special ed program. Instead they gave him grades in regular courses that forced Virginia Tech, as a state college, to admit him.

[SirLinksalot]

Examples are "Gender and Sociopolitical Activism in 20th Century Feminist Utopias" at Macalester College; "Of Nags, Bitches and Shrews: Women and Animals in Western Literature" at Dartmouth College;

and "African and Diasporic Ecological Literature" at Bates College.

Many undergraduate courses focus on extremely specialized subjects of interest only to the professor who is trying to "publish or perish," but of virtually no value to students. Examples are: "Beast Culture: Animals, Identity and Western Literature" at the University of Pennsylvania; and "Food and Literature" at Swarthmore College.

Some English departments offer courses in pop culture. Examples are: "It's Only Rock and Roll" at the University of California San Diego; "Animals, Cannibals, Vegetables" at Emory University; "Cool Theory" at Duke University; and "The Cult of Celebrity: Icons in Performance, Garbo to Madonna" at the University of Pennsylvania.

Of course, English professors now love to teach about sex. Examples are: "Shakesqueer" at American University; "Queer Studies" at Bates College; "Promiscuity and the Novel" at Columbia University; and "Sexing the Past" at Georgetown University.

Some English-department courses really belong in a weirdo department. Examples are: "Creepy Kids in Fiction and Film" at Duke University, which focuses on "weirdoes, creeps, freaks and geeks of the truly evil variety"; "Bodies of the Middle Ages: Embodiment, Incarnation, Practice" at Cornell University; "The Conceptual Black Body in Twentieth-Century and Contemporary Visual Culture" at Mount Holyoke College; and "Folklore and the Body" at Oberlin College.

Replacing the classics with authors of children's literature is now common.

Can someone explain to me how taking the above courses is going to add value to a degree that would cost you about $100,000 for 4 years ?

Why would anyone want to pay $35,000 in tuition a semester to major in "Shakesqueer" and "Queer Studies" ?

And yet strangely, we have students who have very high IQ and good GPA's and high SAT scores who would ACTUALLY PART with that kind of money to be indoctrinated with courses like these... UNFREAKINGBELIEVABLE !

This just proves that intelligence does not necessarily equate to wisdom !

[ComputerGuy]

Who needs English when there's C++ ?
:)

[dfwgator]

What do you call a person with a degree in English Studies?

Waiter.

[SoCalRight]

My son just started at St. John’s College, Annapolis, which offers (solely) a Great Books program, starting with Greek, Plato, Socrates, Euclid, Newton. Shakespeare is one of the new guys.

[Frank_2001]

LOL!

[ComputerGuy]

This just proves that intelligence does not necessarily equate to wisdom
Nor does knowledge necessarily equate to intelligence.

[ConorMacNessa]

I was an English major at Loyola College in Baltimore in the early 70’s. Our department was, in my opinion, the most rigorous in the school and was heavily weighted toward formal criticism and exigetic writing. I had courses in Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton and the Metaphysicals, Neoclassical poetry, Romantic and Victorian poetry, Yeats, Eliot and Pound as well as the introductory courses in Poetry, Fiction and Drama and a two-semester survey course. The analytical and critical skills I learned in the English Department at Loyola have served me well in my professional life.

At the age of 60, I still enjoy reading major English poets and dramatists for recreation. I feel sorry for students today who end up in an English program based on Marxian Criticism, a species of criticism that now seems to be the norm.

[USFRIENDINVICTORIA]

Most common questions from recent grads:

engineering — “What are the design parameters?”
accounting — “What’s the bottom line?”
medicine — “When did you first notice these symptoms?”
English lit — “You want fries with that?”

[Glenn]

Who needs English when there's C++ ?

You need pointers in English, it seems. Then you might understand it.