Last year in this space, we reported that Georgetown University,
capitulating to the meretricious forces of multiculturalism and
political correctness, had decided to scrap the requirement that
students majoring in English read Chaucer, Shakespeare, or Milton
(see “Georgetown Flunks English,” The New Criterion, January 1996).
Instead of immersing themselves in the masterworks of English
literature, English majors could henceforth devote themselves to
such topics as “Studies in Culture and Performance,” an area of
study that—in the words of a document put out by Georgetown’s
English department—focuses on “the power exerted on our lives by
such cultural and performative categories as race, gender,
sexuality, and nationality.” In other words, it was goodbye to Shakespeare,
and hello to multicultural claptrap.

We noted in the course of our report that the situation at
Georgetown, far from being unusual, represented business as usual in
contemporary American higher education. All across the country, traditional
academic standards are under siege. The jettisoning of major
authors in favor a race-gender-class goulash is one aspect of this
siege, and anyone who cares to look will find evidence of it at every turn.

But this is not, of course, what the academic establishment would
have you believe. Even as the teaching of the humanities is being
gutted from within by increasingly rabid ideologues, spokesmen for
the academic establishment are busy bleating that there is no cause
for alarm, that criticism of the academy is overstated, that the hue and
cry over the politicization of the humanities is a fantasy concocted
by “right-wing” extremists.

Indeed, such efforts at damage control have become a routine feature
on the academic landscape. The worse things get, the more
vociferously academic claques broadcast the soothing message to the
public—to parents, alumni, and trustees—that things have never
been better or more salubrious within the expensively cloistered
groves of academe. A typical example of such efforts at damage
control was “What’s Being Taught in Survey Courses?,” a national
poll published by the Modern Language Association a couple of
years ago. As was noted in these pages at the time (see “A Farewell
to the MLA,” The New Criterion, February 1995), this survey of
English departments was essentially a public-relations blind.
Dispensing the cheery news that Chaucer was taught
in 89 percent of undergraduate survey courses, Shakespeare in 77.7 percent, and so
on, the survey was intended to be “reassuring to parents of
college-age students” because it showed that “traditional authors
continue to be the mainstay” of English survey courses.

What this poll did not discuss, of course, was the extent to which
such standard authors are in fact being squeezed out of the
curriculum at prestigious institutions like Georgetown or—in some
ways even more alarming—the extent to which, even when taught, they are
made to serve the radical PC agenda: you know, Milton the
misogynist, Shakespeare the spokesman for white imperialism, etc.

The true gravity of the situation was brought into sharp focus
recently by the National Alumni Forum in a report titled “The
Shakespeare File: What English Majors Are Really Studying.” Sparked
by Georgetown’s decision to eviscerate its requirements for English
majors, the NAF conducted an inquiry into what was in fact being
taught in the country’s top college English departments. The results
of that inquiry were aptly summed up by the headline of an article
that William H. Honan wrote about the study for The New York Times:
“At Colleges, Sun Is Setting on Shakespeare.” As Mr. Honan
notes, the NAF’s new survey shows that

required courses on the great writers are falling by the wayside. In
their place, courses proliferate on popular culture topics, like
“The Gangster Film” (Georgetown), “Melodrama and Soap Opera” (Duke
University) and “20th-Century American Boxing Fiction and Film”(Dartmouth College).

And how is the academy responding to this report? Predictably, with
a combination of diversion, derision, and denial. Quoth William W. Cook,
chairman of the English department at Dartmouth College: “We mustn’t deify
Shakespeare.” Well, OK, but how about simply making sure that
college students read Shakespeare?

As the NAF’s report makes clear, things are even worse than Mr.
Honan’s summary suggests. Of the seventy colleges surveyed, only
twenty-three require English majors to take a course in
Shakespeare. And this result, the report notes,

was reached using a very generous definition of a Shakespeare
requirement: Colleges requiring students to read at least two of
three authors—one of which is Shakespeare—are classified as
requiring Shakespeare, whether or not the student in fact reads the
Bard.

At Dartmouth, for example, English majors “must choose one course
dealing with a single author” and “may choose from among
Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, Ben Jonson, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale
Hurston,” et al. As Jonathan Yardley noted in an astute column on the
NAF report in The Washington Post, “the sheer vulgarity” of this
requirement beggars belief: “Shakespeare and Toni Morrison as
equals!” But such vulgarity, Mr. Yardley goes on to observe,

is everywhere in the English departments, which no longer require
students to study works of literature chosen by scholars for their
quality, importance and universality. Instead they let students pick
and choose in an academic supermarket where “popular culture” as
well as the Holy Trinity of “race, gender and class” are the
dominant elements.

And the closer one looks, the more dismal things get. Mr. Yardley is
quite right that “reading through the lists of courses now offered
by these academic whorehouses, one searches long and hard to find
evidence of literary knowledge, taste or intellectual rigor.” On the
contrary, what one finds are courses dominated by arcane literary
“theory,” radical politics, and anemic sexual grandstanding. Thus
Amherst features courses in the “Literature of Sexuality” (i.e.,
such tasty morsels as “Queer Fictions: Texts from the Turn of the
Century”) while Georgetown’s “Detective Fiction as Social Critique”
enlightens students about how detective novels “critique and offer
alternatives to the nuclear family, traditional masculine values,
and capitalist ideology.”

Defenders of this poisonous academic orthodoxy never tire of telling
us that everything is just dandy in American higher education. The
latest piece of public-relations pablum from the academic
establishment is The Opening of the American Mind: Canons, Culture
and History, by Lawrence Levine, winner of a MacArthur “genius”
fellowship and a professor of history at George Mason University and
the University of California at Berkeley. This book, which was
intended to be the academy’s answer to Allan Bloom’s The Closing of
the American Mind and other books critical of contemporary academic life,
insists ad nauseam that critics of the academy
have provided “no documentation” for their accusations. The truth
is that there now exists a small library of hair-raising
documentation about the decline and perversion of academic
standards. “The Shakespeare File” is an important addition to this
melancholy reading list. It can be had from the National Alumni
Forum, 1625 K Street, N.W., Suite 310, Washington, D.C. 20006.
Telephone: (202) 467-6787.