So Heather McDonald (whose writing I’m nearly always impressed with) has a piece in the Wall Street Journal lamenting the fact that UCLA has changed its requirements for the English major. I can’t actually link to the WSJ piece itself, which is behind a paywall but findable by searching for text in the article, but here’s a link to a blog post which excerpts a significant portion, and here’s the key information from the post/article:
Until 2011, students majoring in English at UCLA had to take one course in Chaucer, two in Shakespeare, and one in Milton —the cornerstones of English literature. Following a revolt of the junior faculty, however, during which it was announced that Shakespeare was part of the “Empire,” UCLA junked these individual author requirements. It replaced them with a mandate that all English majors take a total of three courses in the following four areas: Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability and Sexuality Studies; Imperial, Transnational, and Postcolonial Studies; genre studies, interdisciplinary studies, and critical theory; or creative writing.
Of course, McDonald follows this with commentary on the value of reading the canonical English writers, but, that aside, there’s the bigger question of what it means to have a degree in English.
Here’s a blog post which an old friend of mine, now a professor in Old English, linked to on facebook: “Humanities scholarship is incredibly relevant, and that makes people sad.” Here’s the bottom line of the post: “The humanities didn’t just turn to [the newly popular attention to race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability, in the 1980s) for kicks (still less because it was “fashionable,” as culture-wars critics like Alan Sokal have claimed); turning to them was the result of research. Through research, scholars found out that these categories were complicated, powerful, and important for understanding culture.”
Part of her defense is that it’s valuable that literary and artistic traditions of non-Western, non-white groups have been discovered/preserved, which is all well and good.
She also says, “Academic humanities scholars do this very well, but non-university-affiliated people engage in humanistic work all the time.” — and here refers to, well, basically, everyone who reads or writes fiction (with some odd criteria: fanfiction writers are “engaging in humanistic work” as well as someone who watches every single Eric Rohmer (who’s he?) film you can, or every Start Trek episode — but maybe only if you blog about it — and it’s not particularly clear why only someone who obsesses about it qualifies). This is all well and good — though there was an article a while back asserting that people who read fiction are somehow better, more spiritual and empathetic, than someone who reads nonfiction, which I wasn’t a fan of. But “engaging in the humanities” should be more about engaging in works which are at the highest levels of skill, with a beauty in their prose, not the latest bestseller.
But her examples of “humanities scholarship” I would really question being in fact the humanities; they look a lot more like social science to me, and certainly would really stretch the concept of English literature. And when a new graduate stakes their employability on being an English major, what they want employers to believe is that they’re very good at reading and understanding complex texts and writing about them with a well-honed writing ability that transfers to multiple tasks in the working world.
And at UCLA, this is what they have to say about the English major: The Department of English is dedicated to the study of the literatures and cultures of those parts of the world in which English is the primary language, and to the study of the history and structure of the English language itself.” So I suppose they’re being honest: literature and culture. And, indeed, the major includes four “historical” courses: one in each of the periods pre-1500, 1500 – 1700, 1700 – 1850, and 1850 to present; three “breadth” courses, chosen from three of the four categories of Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability, and Sexuality Studies; Imperial, Transnational, and Postcolonial Studies; Genre Studies, Interdisciplinary Studies, Critical Theory; and Creative Writing (with the provision that Creative Writing courses require instructor approval); and two electives and a senior capstone course.
Of course, looking through the UCLA department website and course descriptions failed to answer the key question: whether studying great literature of the past or modern cultures in the Anglosphere, are students learning to read and reason and write in a highly skillful manner, or not?
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