Yale students are asking that the English department protect them from the works of old white men. A petition demands the English department “decolonize — not diversify — its course offerings.”
The petition asks “the department to reconsider the current core requirements and the introductory courses for the major.”
“We believe it would be unethical for any member of the faculty, no matter their stance on these issues, to vote against beginning the reevaluation process. It is your responsibility as educators to listen to student voices. We have spoken. We are speaking. Pay attention,” it stated.
The issue isn’t so much the content of the works, particularly for the Major English Poets sequences, as it is with the authors. The course “creates a culture that is especially hostile to students of color.”
The petition not only claims to speak for those students, but all students. “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 read.
The Yale Daily News reported on the petition and spoke with students about their experiences. Adriana Miele, who graduated this year, spoke of what she called a “horrifying” experience as an English major, with the department not being her “intellectual home” because “it openly rejects the very legitimate scholarship, criticism and analysis that many other academic departments at Yale embrace.”
During her four years in the major, Miele “primarily was lectured by old, white men about rape, about violence, about death, about colonialism, about genocide, and I was repeatedly told by many of my professors that these evils were necessary or even related to spiritual enrichment.”
Katy Waldman for Slate “applaud[s]” the effort and calls it “an awesome idea.” But, she gives the students a dose of reality.
“If you want to become well-versed in English literature, you’re going to have to hold your nose and read a lot of white male poets. Like, a lot. More than eight,” she wrote.
Waldman suggested that the students want to pretend those old white men have nothing to offer, which she argued against by pointing to Shakespeare, or that they don’t exist. For it is “not possible is to reckon with the racist, sexist, colonist poets who comprise the canon—and to transcend their failures—via a “see no evil, hear no evil” policy,” she wrote.
The students “ask that Major English Poets be abolished, and that the pre-1800/1900 requirements be refocused to deliberately include literatures relating to gender, race, sexuality, ableism, and ethnicity.”
The department already offers such courses, but it is not enough for many students. Margaret Schultz, who graduated this year, supports the petition demands because those classes are upper-level and not part of the core curriculum.
