An exciting special offer showed up in my mailbox today, letting me know that if I subscribed to Human Events for a year, I would get Ann Coulter’s new book for free. This is definitely the most inviting deal I’ve seen since I learned that if I got a long, painful case of stomach cancer, I could also get a debilitating stroke at no extra charge.
It’s awfully tempting. Without Human Events, I wouldn’t be able to read brilliant essays by cutting-edge conservative intellectuals like, oh, say…Phyllis Schlafly.
“Advice to College Students: Don’t Major in English”, reads the headline, and for once, it seems like Phyllis is making sense. Unfortunately, however, the follow-up text doesn’t focus on how our hyper-capitalist society, degraded by decades of absorbing G.O.P. values, no longer esteems the arts, so if you major in English you will end up working at Der Wienerschnitzel. Nor does it warn that, should you major in English, you run a significant risk of growing up to be Mary Grabar. No, instead, Phyllis focuses on the most dreadful prospect of all: majoring in English will turn you into a mass-murdering Communist.
The bad news is that Shakespeare has disappeared from required courses in English departments at more than three-fourths of the top 25 U.S. universities
“Prove,” a good English teacher would note in the margins of Phyllis’ paper, were she still in academia rather than working in a field where one is rewarded for intellectual laziness.
When I visit college campuses, students for years have been telling me that the English departments are the most radicalized of all departments, more so than sociology, psychology, anthropology, or even women’s studies.
Which students? The ones in the English programs? Where? Give examples. Oh, wait, I forgot! It’s Phyllis Schlafly. For “give examples,” read “engage in baseless alarmism.”
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.
To recap: The radicalization of college English departments are why it is to be expected that English majors become mass murderers. Phyllis is 83 years old, of course, and may not be familiar with Google or Wikipedia, so she would have no way of knowing that of all the mass murderers in the last 150 years, the number of them who were English majors, English teachers, or English professors stands at a whopping. . .well, one. Cho Seung-Hui is the sole English major in the whole bloody bunch. Avid churchgoers? Lots of them. Menial laborers? Oh, you bet. High school dropouts aplenty. And military veterans? Whoo-doggie! Oodles of those guys on the list. I don’t think Phyllis is fixing to write a column where she says it’s “no surprise” that a mass murderer was in the armed forces, though.
Phyllis’ inability to work the internetting machine may also explain her somewhat deceptive claim that “Shakespeare has disappeared from required courses”. This doesn’t mean that Shakespeare is no longer required — only that it’s been dropped as a requirement in some courses — nor does it mean Shakespeare isn’t taught in colleges, though she’s clearly happy if you walk away with both those assumptions. Funnier, though, is her towering terror of the presence of un-American values even in the classics:
When the classics are assigned, they are victims of the academic fad called deconstructionism.
Derrida had already pretty well established the tenets of deconstructionism (and was already beginning to repudiate them) by 1967, and he was working off of a foundation put down by Heidegger in the 1930s. So, as fads go, this one’s pretty persistent.
That means: pay no mind to what the author wrote or meant; deconstruct him and construct your own interpretation, as in a Vanderbilt University course called “Shakespearean Sexuality,” or “Chaucer: Gender and Genre” at Hamilton College.
Are you people paying attention? Even as we speak, Communist academics are going around, willy-nilly, claiming that there are sexual elements in the works of William Shakespeare! Phyllis wants Shakespeare taught in our colleges, but it’s important that he’s taught the right way, without anything yucky included.
The facts about what universities are teaching English majors were exposed this year by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. English majors are offered a potpourri of worthless courses.
Well, if the American Council of Trustees and Alumni said it, it must be true! An unimpeachably honest lot, they, with a board consisting of such unbiased truth-seekers as Bill Bennett, Georgie Anne Geyer, Irving Kristol, Marty Peretz, and a senior VP of Texaco.
Some English department courses are really sociology or politics.
Which, of course, have nothing to do with literature.
Shakespeare, Chaucer and Milton have been replaced by living authors who toe the line of multicultural political correctness, i.e., view everything through the lens of race, gender and class based on the assumption that America is a discriminatory and unjust racist and patriarchal society. The only good news is that students seldom read books any more and use Cliffs Notes for books they might be assigned.
It takes a brave, brave woman to write an article in which she claims that it’s a positive development that students don’t read books anymore. But Phyllis Schlafly has always been a brave, crazy brave woman.
Like, for instance, convicted felon and Watergate conspirator 
I have to let you know that I’ve read this Grabar column about fifteen times already, and I’m still not sure I know what the hell she’s talking about. This is world-class wingnuttery, folks; I put this column next to a Kaye Grogan piece and the next thing I knew, Grogan’s writing started looking like an essay by Isaiah Berlin. But we’ll see if we can make it through this romp down sanity’s back forty intact, shall we?
