'Waka Waka Waka' just whacked me!

I am considering a complaint to Malcolm Pollack, the sole proprietor of the Waka Waka Waka site, for plunging me into deep depression - and on a Monday morning, too, when I am already at my lowest ebb.  He reports, via Investors.com, on yet another rape on an American campus - no, no, not one of those peachy blondes they produce in a factory somewhere in California, I mean the rape of English literature studies.  Read on and enter an alien world . . .

Manhattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald shocked a New York City audience at the 2013 Wriston Lecture this month with some examples of what leftist academics have done to the American college curriculum.

"Until 2011," she noted, "students majoring in English at UCLA had been required to take one course in Chaucer, two in Shakespeare, and one in Milton — the cornerstones of English literature.

"Following a revolt of the junior faculty, however, during which it was  announced that Shakespeare was part of the 'Empire,' UCLA junked these individual author requirements and replaced them with a mandate that all English majors take three courses in the following four areas: Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability, and Sexuality Studies; Imperial, Transnational, and Postcolonial Studies; genre studies, interdisciplinary studies, and critical theory; or creative writing."

It is beyond satire but Ms. MacDonald tries irony instead:

What had the students exchanged for the greatness of English literature? Mac Donald demonstrated by quoting "A Midsummer Night's Dream."

"Since once I sat upon a promontory," the fairy king Oberon tells his jester elf Puck, "and heard a mermaid on a dolphin's back uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath that the rude sea grew civil at her song, and certain stars shot madly from their spheres to hear the sea-maid's music."

Then she juxtaposed it with UCLA's official description of its post-colonial studies research grant:

"The theoretical, temporal and spatial intersections of post-coloniality and post-socialism will arrive at a novel approach to race, gender and sexuality in present-day geopolitics."

Next year's Modern Language Association conference, she pointed out, which brings together the country's literature faculty, will be devoted to "poverty, climate, reparations and activism in order to mobilize for change."[My emphasis]

The lunatics haven't taken over the asylum, they are running the entire country!

 

 

Comments

[dearieme]

Awfully over-rated, Milton. Though not half as much as Dickens.

[David Duff]

But either of them are better than "Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability, and Sexuality Studies".

[dearieme]

That's true. Whenever I look at the general state of the universities I think "Dissolution of the Monasteries".

[Malcolm Pollack]

Sorry, Dave old chum. I'm as chopfallen as you are.

[David Duff]

So you should be, Malcolm, giving me bad news on a Monday morning!