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Thursday, September 08, 2005

A Professor Blogging
At The Valve
Takes Offense…


at the idea that the humanities curriculum at many colleges is random, politicized, and dumbed down with pop culture. He writes that people “exaggerate the extent to which the ‘classics’ (and the 'dead white male') ever disappeared from the classroom.” [Look at all them scare quotes!] He proceeds to prove his case by doing things I wouldn’t recommend his undergraduate writing students do.

Instead of statistics, he cites a personal anecdote ( "I’m going to assign the fifth and sixth books of the Republic in my freshman writing class this semester, and I have taught the Symposium, most of Rhetoric, and several other core-friendly works in such classes in the past."). Then he gets all emotional about a recent report on the nature of college writing courses which says mean things about the university where he teaches: “[T]he Briggs report on literature in the composition classroom, sponsored by the ALSC, gratuitously slurs the University of Florida writing program …where I assigned these works (alongside --shock! horror! -- other media).”



Here’s the part of the report that mentions the University of Florida:

[L]iterature’s role in the composition classroom is idiosyncratic, or subservient to the teaching of something else, such as popular culture. The number of film titles in our web survey exceeded the number of pre-1945 literary works…. A second survey (involving ninety chairs, composition directors, and interested faculty from colleges, universities, and California community colleges) added to the impression of fragmentation.

Georgetown’s composition syllabi, each with a different reading list, managed to convey a sense of serious engagement with authors such as Frederick Douglass, Anne Frank, Mary Shelley, Orwell, E. B. White, T. S. Eliot, Morrison, Walker, Stoker, Hemingway, Faulkner, Atwood, Ellison, Delillio, Dostoevsky, Woolf, Austen, Hawthorne, Wells, Lee, More, Conrad, Stevenson, Kuchner, Sophocles, Shakespeare (a different play in each of the eight sections that assigned him), Miller, Shaw, Hansberry, Virgil, Homer, Whitman, Salinger, Gilman, Alison, the Beowulf poet, and a dozen more contemporary novelists. Another dozen instructors assigned literary non-fiction by authors such a Primo Levi, Sartre, Pico Della Mirandola, Kozol, Coles, and others. In contrast, the University of Florida, which posted far more titles on-line than Georgetown, listed syllabi with a dozen films, eight television shows, half a dozen contemporary autobiographies, and dozens of topical essays.


That’s a description, not a slur.