TRUTH IN PACKAGING?

After a lengthy struggle session, there's a catalogue change at Cornell (the fake "big red") University.

Cornell University trustees approved a request from faculty to change the “Department of English” to the “Department of Literatures in English” in the interest of fighting racism.

As Campus Reform reported in November, English Department faculty members voted to change the school’s name during their first faculty meeting of the fall semester. Professor Kate McCullough said that the rebranding would help to avoid the “conflation of English as a language and English as a nationality.”

The reality is that Serious Scholars are often not happy having to do the core curriculum scut-work involving such things as grammar or composition or algebra and they'd rather Somebody Else do that work, whilst they can polish their curricula vitae as Widely Cited Authorities on Anthony Trollope or Heinrich Heine (and I apologize for being probably years behind the times on who the prime Figures of Importance are these days) and raise the next generation of Potentially Widely Cited Authorities.

It's an act of educational malpractice to do that, as the senior noncoms ought be conducting the introductory classes, and teaching the fundamentals of the discipline might be a more effective way of recruiting majors, including those postulants and novices with Authority Potential.  Cornell, though, has a long tradition of "do it in the name of wokeness" and justifying it accordingly.

After faculty overwhelmingly affirmed the measure, they awaited permission from administrators to implement the name change. The Board of Trustees approved the name change in January, and the department’s site currently reflects the new name.

Cornell University spokeswoman Abby Butler directed Campus Reform toward a statement saying that the name change is part of “decolonization efforts” inspired by universities around the world.

According to the statement, Professor Caroline Levine — who supported the measure — said that the "British Empire invented English as an academic discipline as part of a dedicated effort to persuade Indian subjects to view England as a culture superior to their own and so to acquiesce to English rule."

“The connection between literary studies and political power is nothing new, and as our society has grown more plural, so has our literature,” she wrote in the department’s newsletter. “Today, as our own historical moment is prompting us to reflect seriously on long histories of racism in culture and institutions, it seems important to recognize the many writers of color around the world who are producing literatures in English.”

Levine told Campus Reform that she was referencing Gauri Viswanathan’s Masks of Conquest, which “argues forcefully that the curricular study of English can no longer be understood innocently of or inattentively to the imperial contexts in which the discipline first articulated its mission," according to Columbia University Press.

That's basing a major change on one source, but it's consistent with the kind of potted political economy in the guise of literary "theory" that has blighted English departments for years.  I wonder if Cornell's students in other fields will write or reason any better when their composition courses are staffed by somebody affiliated with a department of literatures in English.