Less Marlowe, more modules
The English department will stop teaching English literature.
The University of Leicester will stop teaching the great English medieval poet and author Geoffrey Chaucer in favour of modules on race and sexuality, according to new proposals.
Management told the English department that courses on canonical works would be dropped in favour of modules that “students expect” as part of plans now under consultation.
Foundational texts such as The Canterbury Tales and the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf would no longer be taught, under proposals to scrap medieval literature. Instead, the English faculty will be refocused to drop centuries of the literary canon and deliver a “decolonised” curriculum devoted to diversity.
Why not do both? Why not have English literature with Chaucer for those who want it, and with “modules on race and sexuality” for those who want that? It seems drastic to chop a large segment of English literature out of teaching English literature.
Professors were told that, to facilitate change, management planned to stop all English language courses, cease medieval literature, and reduce early modern literature offerings.
…
Cuts to early modern English modules could see texts such as John Milton’s Paradise Lost omitted, according to concerned academics, with teaching on Christopher Marlowe and John Donne potentially reduced.
Yeah don’t do that. No English literature student should be shortchanged on Marlowe and Donne.
The University of Leicester has said it would continue teaching William Shakespeare’s work.
Oh gee what a generous concession.
Ah, yes, Chaucer, that old colonist. Who can forget having to suffer through “The Conquistador’s Tale”?
“Why not do both?”
Presumably they’ll respond “money”, though that might not be the real answer.
I remain eternally grateful that I went through school when English classes still included English, when science classes focused on science, and when no one worried about whether a student might hear something that disturbed them…in fact, they wanted students to hear something that disturbed them, because most of us need to be shaken out of our complacency.
Oh, there were definitely negatives in those days, like limited diversity (I rarely was given works by women to read; I somehow managed to find those myself, though). I did get some works by African-American men; that trend was starting to happen, and I benefited from it.
And in those days, the faculty decided what the courses would include, not a college president who never even took the courses you’re teaching. The faculty decided what students needed to learn, not the students. The faculty was not always right, but they were right a lot more often than the students, having been through it themselves and knowing a bit more about what was important to call yourself educated. And if anyone suggested allowing a student to demonstrate their knowledge of mitosis through interpretive dance, they would have been laughed out of the business, not promoted to high level positions.
I fear this may be unilateral intellectual disarmament. The conservatives will still read the classics and be better educated for it.
I’m almost speechless. luckily I can still type although my brain is stuttering just trying to comprehend this news. Seriously, run an additional course, or add to the existing one, rather than dropping foundational works that contribute to what English literature is and how it shaped the development of the society that spread English throughout the world. Next these cretins will want to teach Shakespeare in the original Klingon.
You’re right Colin. Not the Trump/magat types, but certainly the hard-core social and intellectual conservatives.
I expect they are only keeping Shakespeare because the Johnsons, the Rees-Moggses & the Goves of this world would, even though they show no signs of having properly read or understood Shakespeare’s work but nevertheless believe that he forms part of our glorious national tapestry, squeak like a nest-full of disturbed rats if the Bard was dropped.
One would like to know precisely what it is that the students ‘expect’. That sounds like ‘administration-speak’ to me: a bald lie trotted out to provide cover for an administrative decision.
@ Tim Harris #6 I hate to have to put in a word for Michael Gove but I do find kneejerk disparagement of people irritating. Gove has a II.1 in English from Oxford which suggests that he may have read Shakespeare with some degree of understanding. There’s a superabundance of things to criticise him for, so better surely to focus on those rather than misrepresenting him.
I wonder why students “expect” modules on race and sexuality as part of an English degree. I’d have thought they’d expect (and want) to learn about English language and literature. That doesn’t preclude discussions of r&s of course. But it should surely include a broad chronological as well as geographical span.
Do they expect that though? Or is someone else deciding that for them?
Richard#7 Well, all I can say is that judging from the way Gove thinks children should be taught, it seems that he has learnt little from his experience of gaining a degree in English.
I entirely agree with the remainder of your remarks.
An academic friend who is very much opposed to this kind of move discussed this bit of news on his personal FB page. I won’t quote any of it, of course, but some of the arguments I found interesting were these:
There has been a shift away from “Great Man” pedagogy. Rather than fawning over how brilliant Bach was, talk primarily about how Bach fits into a context, and what makes his music work so well.
Some suggest that specific content is less important than learning skills and acquiring understanding. Bach is an example, not the whole point.
Representation does matter. Using sources that are entirely white European males does trouble some students to the point where they decide not to continue.
A lot of jobs were cut, and it was covered up by the curriculum change. The school model shifts from one where learned people are helping students become more educated to a cafeteria where students pick what they like best and faculty provide a service. The school promotes a neoliberal capitalist corporate agenda, and this is fine with liberals so long as the faculty is sufficiently diverse.
@Blood Knight:
I’d say it was a branding exercise by the university. Some branding ‘experts’ will have told the brass what students these days ‘expect’ and the resulting recruitment literature will have told the prospective students what they should expect.
So…. Yes, I suspect that is what the students expect but it’s likely a self-fulfilling expectation.
Sackbut#10 As a matter of fact I do agree with getting away from, to a degree (not an academic one!), from the ‘Great Man’ pedagogy. Shakespeare is certainly a very great playwright, but I think it is wrong that he is not taught in the context of Kyd, Marlowe, Jonson, Webster, Middleton and also Massinger (‘The Roman Actor’ is an excellent play), just as great composers like Dietrich Buxtehude, Heinrich Schütz and Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck are too often left aside because of Bach’s (deserved) reputation, a reputation that has quite a bit to do with his importance for subsequent music in German-speaking lands and also with a Lutheran nationalism. And this is not to mention earlier English composers like Tallis & Byrd, who remain too little-known. Surely, what education should be about is to encourage young people to explore.
And exploring should also include, where more modern literature is concerned, not only dead or living white males. I quite understand the feelings of those young people who grow fed up with the focus of many courses.
And regarding your last paragraph about the faculty being now regarded as providing ‘a service’ and promoting ‘a neo-liberal capitalist corporate agenda’, this doesn’t surprise me at all, and I find it appalling, though I am sure Mr Gove would approve, whatever his academic qualifications.
Well it does sound awful and I saw a graduate from the medieval department in Leicester lamenting it, saying how good the medievalists were. Why call it English literature at all if you miss out the foundations of it? It’s like studying American history leaving out the War of Independence.
We had a good medieval department in my university in New Zealand. I remember asking one of the lecturers why we weren’t studying something “more relevant” and he said that was the point of it. He also hated the expression “they thought” about the mental processes of whole cultures. He was an inspiring and enthusiastic teacher, and I specialised in medieval literature as a result. There is something in learning a good deal about a culture that has some similarities to and also profound differences to your own. Also in learning some superb poetry.
English medieval literature is so broad in its scope, diverse in its subjects, and also “European” or at least French and Italian in its influences and flavour. When you read the Scottish medieval poets the sense is not “how Scottish” but “how European” – i.e. sharing common forms (eg the allegory or the chivalrous romance) and common tropes (classical heroes like Aeneas). King Arthur was a common property. It is less chauvinistic than literature of later ages. Its way of looking at the past eg writing of Troilus and Criseyde as if they were contemporaries – gives ease and freshness.
I also note that one of the younger generation in my family is starting at the same university. She is a creative, arty type and I bet if she was from my generation – ie free university and not so concerned about the future – she would study something like literature, music or drama. She is going to do business studies and learn to be an accountant. That is sensible, and means she won’t die under student debt or spend time fruitlessly trying to pursue a career in the arts. It still seems a little sad though. I remember those years of being taught by enthusiastic, well-informed lecturers in subjects which had no immediate practical use as being a great luxury and enrichment.
Well, they do run focus groups. But I suspect what they’re hearing is that students want to hear stuff about race and sexuality (and only the side they agree with), not that they want to drop everything else.
I frequently find, when I listen to the administration, that they have a very clear picture of what students want and expect…and it is 180 degrees different from what the students in my class say they want or expect. From what I’ve seen, a lot of the studies that show these things come from small, Psych 101 classes at Ivy League universities. I have seen several done in community colleges where the results are wildly different, but the puzzled researchers will squeeze and force the data to try and make it fit what they believe students want…to the detriment of the data, the students, and education.
And thee is a huge focus on what students “like” these days. “Students don’t like taking tests.” Well, duh. “Students don’t like having assignments.” Well, duh. “Students would rather the information is presented in video game format.” Well, duh.
Last I checked, students are rarely the best judge of what education is or should be. The only ones worse at knowing that are (1) college administrators and (2) legislators.
This is the real problem in university. KBPlayer, I’m glad you saw the point of it in the end, because a life is much richer for being less about just immediate “relevance”, which in education seems to translate to “can I make money with this?” We are told to make things “relevant”, and in the process, so much is being lost. Beauty is lost. Philosophy is mostly lost. Basic science is lost. Humanity as a whole suffers when we reduce everything down to dollars and cents.
I learned a lot of things in school that are not ‘relevant’. What was the point of teaching me how to write haiku? What was the point of my studying art appreciation (Okay, I’ll accept that; it was my least favorite course). Why spend time reading about an ancient mariner and an albatross? Why study Greek mythology? Actually, that last one I did make relevant, as I draw on it heavily in some of my own writing which would, of course, be seen as not relevant.
If everything is “relevant”, education fails. It does not broaden our world, it narrows it. And if every teacher is forced into the same mode, style, and information (as is happening at our school, and I imagine others), then much is lost of the individual knowledge, quirks, and oddities of individual teaching. In my book, as long as you cover the curriculum, what does it matter if you occasionally bring in some sort of odd tie in between Shakespeare and science, between music and science, between cooking and science? It adds, it doesn’t subtract. And why should we all give the exact same assignments? Allow teachers and students to develop, not atrophy.
@iknlast – re Art Appreciation – I did do a module of Greek art. I have a poor visual memory and found it really difficult – I had to work very hard to scrape a pass. Then I went to Greece and could use my knowledge of black-figure and red-figure vases, which enhanced my enjoyment no end. I am really pleased I did that course.
KBPlayer, I will not denigrate the overall usefulness of art appreciation, but I don’t remember anything from that class, so am unlikely to use it.
I used to hear my mother go on about how she never used Algebra, why had they made her take it? Then I saw her use it every time she went to the grocery store, she just didn’t realize it was Algebra because there were no actual Xs and Ys.
I heard some years ago about The Algebra Project, a math literacy and education advocacy project founded by Bob Moses. I had always felt that algebra was the real key to math literacy, but the interview I heard with Moses, and his discussion of the nature of the project, really cemented it. Algebra provides a different way of understanding numbers, compared to the way people often learn arithmetic through rote application of process. Occasionally I’ll encounter someone who complains, like your mother, about having to take algebra, and I’ll respond that I think algebra is one of the most useful subjects for anyone to take, for reasons exactly like what you described.
https://algebra.org/
It may have changed when Gove was at Oxford, but in my day there was no such thing as a a “II.1 in [any subject] from Oxford”. There were just I, II, III and IV, with no official subdivision of II. Unofficial subdivision into Upper II and Lower II existed, but only because when transferring to a university with II.i and II.ii or for getting a grant to do a D.Phil.the person who had to write a recommendation needed to express an opinion as to whether a II for a particular student was “equivalent” to a II.i. Most other universities didn’t have a IV, but it was really a fail for someone they wanted to get rid of — the problem with a fail was that you had the right to re-sit the exams a year later, but with a IV that was it.
Anyway, getting on to the point, I didn’t study English at that level, but I knew people who did, and although most of them didn’t much enjoy Beowulf they understand why they needed to study it. I never studied Beowulf, but I did study the Prologue of the CanterburyTales at school (at the age of 15, or thereabouts). I didn’t find it especially difficult, and I’m glad to have been exposed to it. More than that, I think that some exposure to Chaucer is an essential part of a broad education, and exposure to Beowulf is an essential part of education in English.
Likewise Latin, and ideally Greek, but that battle seem to have been lost to the barbarians everywhere. I’m glad to have been exposed to both — much more Latin than Greek, but some Greek. Last night we watched a (French) detective programme in which two murder victims had had “LIBRO VITAE” carved into their flesh (post mortem, I’m glad to say). That means the Book of Life, said the more erudite of the detectives. Oh no it doesn’t, I said to my wife: libro is Spanish, not Latin. I wasn’t 100% sure, so I checked today and found that I was right: the Latin word is liber.
I suspect, but hope that I’m wrong, that a module on sexuality means being taught that anyone who “identifies” as a woman must be allowed into any space reserved for women.
Well, yes, the Latin word is liber…in the nominative. It has different forms in the genitive, dative, accusative, ablative, and then all over again in the plural. Dative and ablative are libro.
SINGULAR PLURAL
NOM. liber libri
GEN. libri librorum
DAT. libro libris
ACC. librum libros
ABL. libro libris
OK, you’re right, but I think if I were carving “The Book of Life” into someone’s flesh I would put it in the nominative. On the other hand modern Romance languages mostly inherited ablative forms. I don’t know why, but it seems to been generally true.
On the other hand modern Romance languages mostly inherited ablative forms.
Well actually … (am I mansplaining now?)…
They inherited accusative forms. (Cf. French rien from Latin rem, and the -s ending in French and Spanish plurals — easier to see in Spanish). The singulars tend to look similar to Latin ablatives, because final M’s were lost. The archaic -om ending in the second declension, which we know so well as -um from Classical Latin, evidently was retained in vulgar speech, so the -o that we see in Italian and Spanish is inherited from that, not from the long -о̄ of the ablative.
I’m not sure why Italian has the -i and -e (from -ae) endings of the nominative.
And I love that even though this is a blog about social and political matters, the people on it (including the esteemed owner of the blog) are geeky enough to appreciate this.
Oh this blog is about whatever comes into my head.
It started out being more specific than that, but then veered into omnium gatherum (not actual Latin).
<3
In Italian it's omnio gathero, of course.
snerk
In a ceremony in the Great Hall of Sydney University in 1962, I was admitted to the degree of Bachelor of Arts. Our occasional address was given by the Professor of Classics, whose name I unfortunately forget, but he had previously been Professor of Classics at the University of Manchester, UK.
He told us that he was approached one day by one of that city’s leading cotton millers, who asked him if he would be so good as to supply the names of his four best classics students. The professor replied: “I certainly will, but would you mind my asking you why?”
“Because I want to offer each of them a job,” replied the miller.
A bit nonplussed, the professor asked “what has knowledge of the classics got to do with cotton milling?”
Said the miller: “I can teach each of them all they need to know about the cotton business inside a week. But I need people who can think!”
They will do it at their own peril.
We hear something similar at our school. We have a skilled and technical division that teaches many different skills to students. There is always a push to minimize the math, science, and reading/writing courses to try to et them through quicker, and because the students don’t like them. Then we have advisory board meetings with local business owners who complain that they are getting people who can’t read, write, or do math well enough, and they can’t communicate well. So our response? Push even harder to reduce the academic courses. Or to “dumb down” the courses we do teach (they don’t call it that, of course. It’s just…teaching to the level of the students. I personally think we should be teaching slightly above the level of the students…way above if they aren’t anywhere close to college level…and pulling them up to that level).
Here are the Latin declensions, singular and plural.
What is this that roareth thus?
Can it be a Motor Bus?
Yes, the smell and hideous hum
Indicat Motorem Bum!
Implet in the Corn and High
Terror me Motoris Bi:
Bo Motori clamitabo
Ne Motore caedar a Bo—
Dative be or Ablative
So thou only let us live:—
Whither shall thy victims flee?
Spare us, spare us, Motor Be!
Thus I sang; and still anigh
Came in hordes Motores Bi,
Et complebat omne forum
Copia Motorum Borum.
How shall wretches live like us
Cincti Bis Motoribus?
Domine, defende nos
Contra hos Motores Bos
iknklast @#28:
In other words, if your thinking isn’t short-term enough, shorten the term of it still further. Eventually, you will have shortened it down to a singularity, and it will disappear down a black hole of its own making. The students will not have to prove that they have learned anything in order to pass the course.
Meanwhile, the prospective employers seeking what they believe they need, will probably be looking wider afield.
‘short-term’ thinking – and, of course, it makes the task of teaching much simpler: modular teaching to go with modular learning. info out & info in. No need to explore things & encourage exploration, open new vistas, interest and challenge students, encourage them to think, etc. Their expectations are being reduced by administrative convenience and dogmas about market forces to how many credits a module might provide, how simple a module might be to take.
Back in 1962 my father worked for a cotton company in Manchester, but he wasn’t a classics student. He had been in the Navy but had to retire when still fairly young for health reasons, and had to continue earning his living. (In those days the Navy did very little to help people in his situation.) He hated the job!
I saw this article and thought it might be of interest here. University of Vermont, which has long prided itself on being a research university with a strong liberal arts core, is eliminating departments, eliminating majors, and cutting faculty. Most of these cuts are in the liberal arts. The article discusses the different views of the value of a liberal arts major; it also addresses the revenue picture, which is much stranger and thornier than I had expected, given that many liberal arts departments actually are net providers to the rest of the university, with their low expenses and high tuition revenue. Worthwhile reading, I think.
https://www.sevendaysvt.com/vermont/major-fallout-uvm-scholars-argue-that-cuts-to-the-humanities-would-imperil-the-universitys-mission/Content?oid=32189710