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.