THE SEPPUKU OF THE ENGLISH DEPARTMENT.

Power Line's Steven Hayward reads the Hopkins summer course catalog so you don't have to.

Here’s a current summer course offering from Johns Hopkins University:

Climate Fiction and Capitalist Accumulation – AS.060.186

This course will examine the relationship between capitalist accumulation, the climate crisis, and contemporary climate fiction. What is capitalist accumulation? How has this process led to the contemporary climate crisis? What ideas constitute its ideological apparatus? How do contemporary climate fictions critique and/or amplify these ideas? With these questions as our point of departure, we will read a selection of contemporary climate fiction alongside excerpted works of history, climate science, and critical theory. Through this examination, we will develop an understanding of how contemporary climate fictions participate in climate change discourse, politics, and the social struggles that both underpin and are exacerbated by climate change. By the end of the course, students will be able to define capitalist accumulation, its politics, and its ideas, as well as climate fiction. Students will analyze how climate fictions critique and amplify capitalist ideology and politics. Students will develop insights into how climate fictions perform this work at the levels of both content and form. Finally, through critical and creative writing projects that engage, reconsider, and respond to the course readings, students will refine critical thinking and writing skills.

And people wonder why students are avoiding English literature.

It's a five week online course in late summer, with no reading list currently available for viewing.  I doubt very much whether there will be close reading of Chapter XXII, Volume I of Das Kapital, which lays out Marx's notion of the general principle of capitalist accumulation, let alone Kenneth Boulding and the cowboy economy.

I wish I didn't have to keep calling attention to this sort of foolishness, but that's not my lot in life.

It's the latest manifestation of the soft bigotry of low expectations, notes Richard L. Cravatts, guest posting at Minding the Campus.

When did it become necessary for an English department in a public university to make as a central feature of its teaching social issues? This is not a social justice department, or a black studies department, or an institute or program that focuses on race, social issues, and activism. So the letter’s stated intention that the English Department will “stand with and respond to the Black Lives Matter movement . . . create and promote an anti-racist environment . . . and . . . contribute to the eradication of the violence and systemic inequities facing black, indigenous, and people of color members of our community” seems wildly inconsistent with what is, and should be, the role of an English department.

Not content with making a course in African-American literature a requirement in the English curriculum, every aspect of the pedagogy and instruction must be suffused with layers of obsessive victimology and racism, including sponsorship of workshops that seek to “cultivate critical conversations for Writing Program instructors around the disproportionate impacts of COVID-19; state power; racism; violence; white supremacy; protest and resistance; and justice.”

Particularly because we'd hope the professors and instructors of composition ought be conversant with topics such as close reading or point of view, and that might get in the way of getting the kind of deep understanding of political economy or sociology or even the martial arts.  Students will have even more reason to think of composition as simply another meeting of compulsory chapel to read from the Gospel of Intersectionality, and their understanding of Holy Writ might well be that of Tom Sawyer's knowledge of the apostles.

I'm not sure what sort of critical thinking skills are going to be strengthened in a summer month, but, then, I never served on a Hopkins curriculum committee.