FIRST, STOP DESTROYING YOUR OWN DISCIPLINE.

A contributor to Inside Higher Ed is not happy that her Purdue Ph.D. in English is being disrespected by the current administration at Purdue.

The assault on funding and faculty hiring in Purdue University’s English department needs to stop. Now more than ever, a strong grounding in writing and speaking skills, in storytelling and poetry, in culture, should remain strong for a future that depends increasingly on sophisticated technology.

As Inside Higher Ed has reported, recent moves to cut graduate student spots threaten the publication of the highly respected Sycamore Review, a student-run literary journal at Purdue. The department is facing a moratorium on graduate student admissions for the 2022–23 academic year. In recent years, about 20 faculty positions in English have been lost through attrition, and the number of graduate programs has been reduced from six to three.

I'd be more inclined to credit such arguments if I didn't have so much experience with the failure of the English department to develop those writing and speaking skills.  Moreover, is this Sycamore Review just more wokery with big words?  Do people confuse it with sports information at Indiana State?

Purdue is well-known for its engineering programs—the 153-year-old land-grant university is, after all, the home of the Boilermakers. But in a letter to the Purdue Exponent, electrical and computer engineering professor Avi Kak wrote that cuts to Purdue’s English department will impact the entire university, preventing the growth of writing and thinking skills so important to students in all disciplines.

It's only going to get worse.  It's not budget-conscious deanlets risking eroding those basic skills.  The Distressed Material is going to show up at Purdue, thanks to the efforts of the teachers of those skills in the common schools.

Educators value the use of teaching and learning practices that help to identify and disrupt the inequalities of contemporary life, including structural racism, sexism, consumerism, and economic injustice. Critical pedagogies help learners see themselves as empowered change agents, able to imagine and build a better, more just world.

That's a position statement from the National Council of Teachers of English.  Whether it's incoherent jargon or question-begging or potted political economy is left for the reader as an exercise.  I wonder if your typical English teacher can even compare and contrast the vanguardist from the evolutionary perspective on what structures a better world.  The elaboration gets even weirder.

Young people encounter many types of media texts and use many different literacy practices throughout a given day. Everyone in our society now needs the ability to assess the widely varying quality of the information, entertainment, and persuasion that surrounds them, to evaluate the veracity and validity of claims, and to debunk misinformation when necessary. The broadening of the communication landscape opens greater opportunities for student voice and agency as they move from users and consumers to participators and creators. Through media education, students begin to deepen sociopolitical consciousness as they recognize how power relationships structure the narratives that surround us (Buckingham & Sefton-Green, 1993).

A more superficial knowledge of a lot of stuff does nothing to develop the kind of deeper understanding that is essential to recognize when someone is talking rot, let alone whatever "deepen sociopolitical consciousness" is.  Just for fun, toss "reality is socially conservative" or "reality constructs institutions" at some novice English teacher and see what happens.  I predict a Kamala Harris-like intellectual shutdown.

The council's vision, however, will only induce more administrators at engineering or mathematically inclined institutions of higher learning to further decenter their English departments.

The time has come to decenter book reading and essay writing as the pinnacles of English language arts education. Speaking and listening are increasingly valued as forms of expression that are vital to personal and professional success, and with the rise of digital media technologies, they now occur in both synchronous and asynchronous formats. The ability to represent one’s ideas using images and multimedia is now a valued competency in a wide variety of professional careers in the knowledge economy. It behooves our profession, as stewards of the communication arts, to confront and challenge the tacit and implicit ways in which print media is valorized above the full range of literacy competencies students should master.

Research evidence amply shows the need to move beyond the exclusive focus on traditional reading and writing competencies. For example, secondary school students lack critical reading comprehension skills that require them to distinguish between journalism and sponsored content, and they routinely ignore the source of a message when judging its accuracy (Breakstone et al., 2019). But when students are empowered to critically examine popular culture texts in the classroom, the process can productively disrupt classroom hierarchies as learners exercise the right to freedom of expression on issues that are perceived to have meaningful relevance to their identity and values (Cannon et al., 2020).

Division of labour is a thing. I have no problem with teachers of rhetoric or composition or drama tackling difficult topics. They ought leave the heavy political economy to philosophers, theologians, and economists.