Just as a medical student needs to know how to check blood pressure, a lawyer to write legal documents, and an electrician to change circuits, an English major must know Shakespeare.
But in response to an idiotic student call “to decolonize” its English department, Yale will no longer require its English majors to study Shakespeare.
As the College Fix notes, “the English department now allows students to fill three required prerequisites from a choice of four different courses: Readings in English Poetry 1, Readings in English Poetry 2, Readings in American Literature, and a newly created course, Readings in Comparative World English Literature. Because Chaucer and Shakespeare are both studied in English Poetry 1, these expanded options mean that a student could graduate from the program without ever reading either of these authors.”
The problem here is that William Shakespeare’s works are the root of modern English studies; without them, a student cannot truly know English in an academic sense.
After all, in his unmatched balance of complex storytelling and emotive writing, Shakespeare both entertains his readers and encourages them to contemplate important issues. But more than that, Shakespeare’s writings are the timeless foundations that inspired hundreds of the greatest writers in history. Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, for example, is a deliberate and unabashed Twentieth Century heir to Shakespeare’s plays.
On its website, Yale’s English department claims that it “aims to help deepen students’ insights into their own experience and to develop their ability to express their ideas orally and in writing.”
That sounds good, and I’m sure the faculty will endeavor to achieve that noble effect. But without being made to study Shakespeare, students can now graduate from one of the world’s finest universities without knowing the most important of all English writers.
The loss is clear.
