Late last month, at the end of a turbulent academic year at Yale, a petition appeared online that asked—demanded, really—the English faculty to change its requirements for majors. Although its specific demands are inconsistent, the gist is clear: The students don’t want to take a two-semester course devoted to the poetry of only white men.
The course in question is called Major English Poets, which the department’s website calls “perhaps the most distinctive element of English at Yale.” Anyone wishing to major in the program must take English 125 and 126, studying Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Donne the first semester and Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, and Eliot or another modern poet in the spring.
You may immediately recognize the shortcoming of this requirement: no Victorian poets! But the students are disgruntled because they see nothing but skin color and sex, and declare that two semesters of reading only straight white men is traumatic. “A year spent around a seminar table where the literary contributions of women, people of color, and queer folk are absent actively harms all students, regardless of their identity,” the petition grumbles.
This comes at the end of a remarkably fractious year at Yale. There was the much-publicized flap over potentially offensive Halloween costumes, in which a residential college master and associate master were so harassed by students for their opinions that they eventually resigned. There was a march organized by Next Yale (a student group inspired by Black Lives Matter), responding in part to a report that an undergraduate had been denied entry into a party because she was not white. Yale’s president held a long listening session with students who expressed their discomfort and sense of alienation; he confessed to minority students, “We have failed you.” The university considered, but ultimately decided against, renaming the residential college currently named after John C. Calhoun, a Yale alum and proponent of slavery. But it did retire the title “residential college master” because there was once such a thing as a “slave master.” No word yet on whether the university will still be offering Master’s degrees.
With all of this ferment, activists at Yale might appreciate the famous lines about the early days of the French Revolution: “Bliss it was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven!” The thrill of fighting—and defeating—entrenched authority and arbitrary power! The triumph of liberty and reason over stale custom! But Wordsworth wrote those lines, and he’s so scarily pale and male he should be added to the list of forbidden Halloween costumes.
The authors of the English major petition are eager to associate themselves with the previous controversies, claiming to write because they are “inspired by student activism across the university, and to make sure that you know that the English department is not immune from the collective call to action.” The letter concludes with a line that seems to draw directly from the mass protest March of Resilience, which featured the Next Yale chant, “We out here. We’ve been here. We ain’t leaving. We are loved.” This letter concludes with the feeble imitation, “We have spoken. We are speaking. Pay attention.”
They hope, then, to capitalize on the college’s revolutionary mood. But it’s not really clear who they are. The request to change pre-requisites implies that they’re English majors, yet they identify themselves only as “undergraduate students in the Yale English Department.” That vague description could mean they’ve taken a couple of English courses during their academic career and have no vested interest in the curriculum apart from targeting it for social advocacy. Is this a sincere call for reform, or an Astroturf petition written to make a point?
The petitioners are also inconsistent in their demands. They initially “oppose the continued existence of the . . . sequence as the primary prerequisite for further study.” A paragraph later, the demand changes: “We ask that Major English poets be abolished”—not removed as the primary pre-req, but abolished.
In addition to these strange locutions, the petition gives the impression that Yale’s English courses lack diversity. That’s simply false. For one thing, it is already possible for students to satisfy the major’s requirements by replacing Major English Poets with other courses. This does require the approval of the Director of Undergraduate Studies, and entails alternate course work to study poets included in the prerequisite. The department thus emphasizes the importance of English 125 and 126, but at least offers an alternative.
What’s more, this past spring alone students could have taken courses titled Women Writers from Restoration to Romanticism (hard to say 10 times fast, but a great list of authors), Animals in Modern American Fiction, The Spectacle of Disability, Postcolonial World Literature, Asian American Literature, The Nonhuman in Literature and Culture since 1800, Ralph Ellison in Context, and Race and Gender in American Literature. Hardly a catalog confined to privileged white men.
For a moment, though, let’s concede that any good English course must address issues like race, class, and gender from a perspective that social justice warriors find amenable. Even in that case, the petitioners might actually like a lot of what they study in Major English Poets (that is, apart from the beauty of the poems’ language and other apparently irrelevant aesthetic concerns). Shakespeare’s sonnets have plenty to offer anyone interested in queer theory. Pope was a member of the legally-oppressed Catholic minority as well as a hunchback, which his critics never let him forget. Although feminist students will dislike his opinions about female behavior, they may also find common ground with Pope’s depiction of masculine aggression in The Rape of the Lock. Wordsworth’s early poetry was radical, depicting the rural poor and promoting revolutionary ideals. No students will like Spenser’s opinions about empire, but they may recognize surprisingly progressive notions of gender and female authority in The Faeire Queene. Milton was a political radical, an ardent apologist for divorce, and a blind man by the end of his life.
Moreover, the prerequisite’s description gives the professor discretion to toss out T.S Eliot and replace him with another modern poet. It’s possible to teach Derek Walcott’s marvelous Omeros and discuss how this modern epic plays with the formal conventions established by Spenser, Milton, and Wordsworth. Simply put, thoughtful students taking the course with a good professor would resist melting these pale poets into a single pot of oppression.
Throughout the petition, bold but empty pronouncements raise important questions about what the students expect from an undergraduate education. The authors tell the faculty, “It is your responsibility as educators to listen to student voices.” That is true. Teachers should listen to students. That does not mean they should do whatever students say. Professors are experts; students are amateurs. The former know more about the discipline and should not change program requirements because some students don’t want to read the most important English poets.
The authors assert that “when students are made to feel so alienated that they get up and leave the room, or get up and leave the major, something is wrong.” Yes, there is—with the students. It is certainly true that being able to relate to writers can make the experience of reading more enjoyable. But the serious study of literature requires an understanding of literary context and history, and that means reading many authors you would not put on your Dream Dinner Party list. Indeed, a traditional rationale for the study of literature, as President Obama said last year of reading fiction, is that it helps people understand “it’s possible to connect with some[one] else even though they’re very different from you.”
Finally, the petition declares that “it’s time for the English major to decolonize—not diversify—its offerings.” In left-wing academic discourse, the difference is that to diversify means bringing in other voices without undermining the basic power structure, whereas de-colonizing goes further by challenging the white male hegemony as the center of the course, social structure, etc. Throwing out the Major English Poets, then, is a way of saying that English literature must not be built around white men.
But, historically speaking, it is. Not because white men are innately better writers than everyone else. They’re not. Rather, as the activists might put it, these men had white male privilege, the social permission and education to write and publish. As that power has faded, so has the dominance of white male writers. But to pretend this was never the case, that Chaucer and the other poets in these courses have not played an outsize role in the development of literature in English, is to deny obvious historical facts.
Perhaps the students wouldn’t deny this—they simply want to ignore it, to avoid studying the work from periods whose political and social realities they (and most everyone) find repugnant. But Yale’s curriculum forces them to engage with literature’s longer history.
The petition is another example of attacks on core curricula, a popular target these days. A core curriculum gives students a common intellectual foundation and common point of reference, a specific set of authors and poems that every one of them knows well and can discuss together, no matter when they graduated or what else they studied. If the faculty is eager to concede that the department needs more diversity, they can do so without casting off the unique and important sequence of Major English Poets. A possible compromise is requiring all majors to take a course in, for example, postcolonial literature, or British women writers.
Chances are, though, that the students who flee from the requirement like Thomas Wyatt’s old lovers are unlikely to be satisfied with anything but complete emancipation from Major English Poets. Let’s hope that the English faculty at Yale stands its ground and defends its core requirement.
