University of Pennsylvania students took down a large, centrally-located portrait of Shakespeare from the English Department to send a message of inclusivity, according to the department’s chair.
According to the Daily Pennsylvanian, a small but determined mob of English majors executed a swap of the artwork for a depiction of the black queer poet Audre Lorde after an English Department meeting on December 1. The meeting, presumably a fraught discussion, was a town hall focused on the presidential election.
Per the Daily Pennsylvanian:
Esty, to whose office students delivered the discarded portrait two weeks ago, has stated no intention to restore it to its former position of honor—on the first landing of the building’s main staircase.
Instead, he wrote in a predictably mushy statement on behalf the English Department, “We invite everyone to join us in the task of critical thinking about the changing nature of authorship, the history of language, and the political life of symbols.”
Speaking of symbols, the image of Audre Lorde, printed on 25 pieces of A4 paper, fills a fraction of the space where Shakespeare’s portrait used to be.
Campuses across the country have organized vigils and comforted distraught undergrads in reaction to the election. At Penn, students vented their rage by lashing out against literature. Leave it to the logic of campus identity politics to render Donald Trump and William Shakespeare equal enemies of inclusivity, by virtue of their common white-maleness.
