After reading Mark Gauvreu Judge’s “The Hoya! The Hoya!” (May 6), I predict this misdirected young man has a promising future not as a journalist but as a fiction writer. Rarely are readers treated to such a caricature of the facts as in Judge’s description of the changes in requirements for English majors at Georgetown University.
Judge’s fictional portrait — based on his three-month stint as an office assistant in the English department — of the 60s radicals nailing shut the coffin on Shakespeare, Milton, and Chaucer just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. For a university of its size, Georgetown offers more than three times the national average of Shakespeare courses. Far from disappearing from the curriculm, Shakespeare course have tripled in the last 20 years from three in 1977 to the nine sections offered this year.
As an associate professor of English at Georgetown, I teach Shakespeare and Renaissance literature. I am also one of the professors who teach “Cultural Representations of Women,” where students do indeed view the film Thelma and Louise. They also read Toni Morrison, Freud, and the Bible. Students view the film in its larger cultrual context, and we discuss how the mainstream media’s treatment of the film revealed deep-seated anxieties about women, violence, and representation.
The issue isn’t really about Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Milton, but rather about the nature of knowledge and the nature of students. Our critics would tell us that knowledge is fixed and absolute and, indeed, eternal. They would hand to us their hagiography of authors and have us teach little else.
Their view of students, as Charles Eliot of Harvard University saimd more than 100 years ago, is equally unenlightened: “The conservative argument is: A college must deal with the student as he is; he will be what he has been, namely, a thoughtless, aimless, lazy, and possibly vicious boy; therefore a policy which gives him liberty is impracticable.” At Georgetown, we disagree with the “conservative argument.”
EDITOR-NOTE:
MARK GAUVREAU JUDGE RESPONDS: Professor Hall refers to me as “misdirected” and my article as “fiction,” yet she doesn’t do much to refute the facts of my piece. She states that the number of Shakespeare courses has increased. But the point is that English majors are no longer requried to take Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, and other cornerstones of English literature. Instead they can graudate having pondered “Cultural Representations of Women,” “AIDS and Representations,” and ” International Culture and the New World Order.”
Kim Hall, Washington, DC
