Phyllis Schlafly has published a rant about English departments, which, she claims, “are the most radicalized of all [university] departments, more so than sociology, psychology, anthropology, or even women’s studies.” I know about this because I get news from the English department at SLU, where Schlafly’s “Advice to College Students: Don’t Major in English” is the topic of discussion on a new departmental listserv. I think this is one more thing I’ll not join. Schlafly, like David Horowitz, isn’t worth answering, and besides, I don’t give a flying fuck what Horowitz, Schlafly, and people who agree with them think.
Tim Burke has a couple of nice academic posts heading up his blog right now. I especially like his use of a quote from Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger:
In America, the political left and political right have conspired to create a culture and politics of victimization, and all the benefits of resentment and cynicism have accrued to the right. That’s because resentment and apocalypse are weapons that can be used only to advance a politics of resentment and apocalypse. They are the weapons of the reactionary and the conservative — of people who fear and resist the future. Just as environmentalists believe they can create a great ecological politics out of apocalypse, liberals believe they can create a great progressive politics out of resentment; they cannot. Grievance and victimization make us smaller and less generous and can thus serve only reactionaries and conservatives.
I rather think Nordhaus and Shellenberger are correct, but I also think there’s no point in answering pundits on the right who preach resentment and apocalypse. It’s preaching to the choir; and besides, statements such as: “That’s why it was no surprise that Cho Seung-Hui, the murderer of 32 students and teachers at Virginia Tech, was an English major,” don’t need to dignified by an answer.
On the other hand, one might be grateful that English departments matter enough to be attacked by Schlafly, though she points out that “only 1.6 percent of America’s 19 million undergraduates major in English, according to Department of Education figures.” The late unlamented culture wars were mostly about what was or was not being taught in English departments. I guess that continues to be true, even though the wench is dead. And I think Shakespeare, whom Schlafly brings up as a casualty of the culture wars, is not about to be buried in the off-campus stacks. Shakespeare belongs, more than ever and as much as he always has, to popular culture, which is now giving us a new and kitschy version of the reign of his queen that I’m dying to see.
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