Why would an English major need to study Shakespeare? It’s much more important to focus on Imperial, Transnational, and Postcolonial Studies, right?

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Colleges Substitute Western Greats With Gender Studies

Parents pay a fortune to send their kids to big-name colleges, and they expect strong scholarship in return. More and more, what they’re getting ranges from drivel to leftist indoctrination.

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.”

As Mac Donald put it, “In other words, the UCLA faculty was now officially indifferent as to whether an English major had ever read a word of Milton, Chaucer or Shakespeare, but was determined to expose students, according to the course catalogue, to ‘alternative rubrics of gender, sexuality, race and class.'”

UCLA is far from alone, “but the UCLA coup was particularly significant because the English Department there was one of the last champions of the historically informed study of great literature uncorrupted by ideological overlay,” Mac Donald noted.