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Et tu, Brute?
Since its publication last month, The Vanishing Shakespeare has received favorable notices from USA Today, the San Francisco Chronicle the Weekly Standard, and the Rocky Mountain News, as well as individual endorsements from, among others, Emory English professor Mark Bauerlein, NRO's Stanley Kurtz, New York Observer critic Ron Rosenbaum (The Shakespeare Wars), and Robert Brustein, who is the founding director of both the Yale Repertory Theatre and Harvard's American Repertory Theater. The Shakespeare report does have its critics, though, as all significant challenges to the academic status quo do.
Perhaps the most common criticism of ACTA's Shakespeare report is that there is no cause for alarm because students still voluntarily take Shakespeare classes. Because courses on Shakespeare are popular, the argument goes, Shakespeare need not be required.
This point was made by a commenter on ACTA's blog, a recently graduated Yale English major who argued that since many people voluntarily take Shakespeare at Yale, and since Shakespeare seemed to show up a lot in the courses she took, that a requirement was not needed. The logic has been echoed by a UVa English major: "I was told a couple of years ago by the undergraduate chair that, even though the department stopped requiring Shakespeare, the level of attendance in Shakespeare classes has hardly gone down since we stopped requiring it," she writes. "In other words, we probably stopped requiring Shakespeare because there wasn't much of a need to make it mandatory. Not only are most English majors taking it, but a lot of non-English majors take Shakespeare as an elective, as well." Others have made similar points.
It's worth looking closely at the logic offered here, because it's just not very substantial. It's wonderful that Shakespeare is popular among college students, and English majors who voluntarily choose to study his works are to be commended. But a subject's popularity should have nothing whatever to do with whether it is required for majors in a given discipline. Major requirements are not punishments; they do not exist simply to force students to study what they normally would not study, and they do not cease to be necessary when student interest happens to align with them.
The purpose of major requirements is to outline a coherent, integrated course of study for students who, it goes without saying, cannot be expected to know instinctively what courses they ought to take. All academic departments should clearly outline what their undergraduate majors should know; major requirements are a huge part of that. When an English department requires Shakespeare, as Harvard, Berkeley, and UCLA do, for example, it is saying that knowledge of Shakespeare is essential for a degree in the field. When an English department does not require Shakespeare, it is saying that knowledge of Shakespeare is not essential for a degree in the field. The fact that students can take Shakespeare electives that count toward the major, and that these courses attract plenty of students, is really beside the point.
It may be the case that, to return to an example above, Yale English majors often choose to take Shakespeare. But, as another commenter on this blog noted, "In Fall 2007 one can satisfy Yale's three pre-1800 requirements with courses on Romantic poetry, women writers from the Restoration to Romanticism, and colonial literatures of America. In other words, students can get an English literature degree from Yale without reading anything written before the seventeenth century, and without reading a single canonical author before the Romantic poets. Never mind Shakespeare -- students can avoid the entire medieval/Renaissance era if they choose."
English majors deserve stronger guidance. And college and university administrators, including English department chairs, should require English departments to provide it. If Shakespeare is a pivotal author for anyone studying English literature--and even the critics of ACTA's study acknowledge that he is--then English departments should say so, and should revise their major requirements to reflect that.
ACTA's report concludes with a noteworthy quote from Columbia humanities professor Andew Delbanco, whose words sum up the problem perfectly: "Colleges will fulfill their responsibilities only when they confront the question of what students should learn--a question that most administrators, compilers of rank lists, and authors of books on higher education prefer to avoid."
Posted by acta online on May 07, 2007 at May 7, 2007 03:31 PM
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