From the April 23rd Weekly Standard:
The Bard's Bad Birthday
April 23 marked William Shakespeare's 443rd birthday. He's getting old, in other words, which may explain why the ever-youthful, forever hip Baby Boomers who now control our nation's colleges and universities have decided he's not worth bothering about.
The indispensable American Council of Trustees and Alumni has just released a report about the status of Shakespeare in higher education, and the results, you won't be surprised to learn, are deeply depressing. ACTA surveyed English departments at Big Ten schools, the top 25 liberal arts colleges, and U.S. News & World Report's 25 highest ranking universities. Only 15 of them require English majors to take a course on Shakespeare. In 1996, the last time such a survey was taken, 23 of the 70 schools had a Shakespeare requirement.
So what are the faculty teaching instead? Well, if you're lucky enough to be an English major at Northwestern, you can ogle a course on TV's Baywatch, starring Pamela Anderson, who's a Globe Theater all to herself. At the University of Pennsylvania you can take a class in "radical vegetarian manifestos"; at Yale, you can study Lemony Snicket and Dr. Seuss; at Duke you can get credit for "Creepy Kids in Fiction and Film." Then you can pocket your English B.A. and escape Shakespeare altogether.
The effects of this outrageous negligence will trickle down, as graduates ignorant of Shakespeare go off to teach English to high school students, who will themselves remain ignorant of Western civilization's crowning glory. "It's easy to imagine a day," the ACTA report concludes, "when schoolteachers will not have read Shakespeare and will not teach him."
And then there will be no one left to quote Duke Senior from As You Like It: "True is it that we have seen better days."
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Originally posted by der schwarze RitterHow can an English department not require Shakespeare?ðŸ˜
From the April 23rd Weekly Standard:
The Bard's Bad Birthday
April 23 marked William Shakespeare's 443rd birthday. He's getting old, in other words, which may explain why the ever-youthful, forever hip Baby Boomers who now control our nation's colleges and universities have decided he's not worth bothering about.
The indispensable Ameri klystandard.com/Utilities/printer_preview.asp?idArticle=13554&R=1131B1FEC3