Paradise Lost
Driving across a bridge, one hopes that the people who designed and built it took at least a rudimentary course in calculus when they were in college. Ditto with, say, airliners: if the people behind the plane never acquired any background in physics, the thing is never going to get into the air, much less stay there. So by that logic, while the stakes are certainly not as high in terms of the potential for disaster, it’s still not too much of a stretch to think that undergraduates looking to take home a degree in English after four years of study should have had at least some exposure to the giants of the field–Milton, Chaucer and Shakespeare.

This is, unless you are one of the poobahs who head the English department at Georgetown University, my alma mater, which back in 1995–when I was still a student there–dropped the requirement that English majors take at least two courses studying the aforementioned giants of the field. Instead, even though students were clamoring for more, and not less, traditional-style offerings, they were given courses by the department’s tenured radicals on everything from the films of Alfred Hitchcock (well, okay) to "Prison Literature" (huh?).

People sometimes ask me how it is that I got started in writing and journalism. As it turns out, it was somewhat by accident (when I pulled up in front of my freshman dorm back in 1992, I had every intention of becoming–I shudder to think of it now–a lawyer). But it wasn’t long before I got involved with the alternative campus press, in the form of a more or less monthly number called The Georgetown Academy, a smartly done tabloid that took its inspiration from papers like the Dartmouth Review. For the first three years of my time on campus, we chugged along, taking a stand against some of the more severe depredations of the school’s Roman Catholic tradition by the university president, Rev. Leo O’Donovan, a Jesuit who, to put it charitably, didn’t have much interest in defending the faith (he even allowed crucifixes to be removed from many of the classrooms after some agitators called them symbols of oppression). But we never got much attention beyond the school’s gates.

And then, the storm hit.

One day, a friend of the paper, an English major in my year named Phil Cardinale, let us know that his department was scrapping the classics requirement, allowing students to graduate without ever having learned that "wherefore" means "why." Instead, he told us, one could spend four years and upward of $100,000 of one’s parents’ money and take nothing but courses such as "Gender, Class and Culture in the Contemporary United States," "Genres and Rhetorics of Literature and Culture: Representations of Shame" and "Cultural and Political Erotics in Cuban America." (And no, that last one doesn’t include a guest lecture by Marisleysis Gonzalez.)

Interestingly, although some officials claimed that the shift–which the department slid through with barely a peep of publicity–was designed to meet student demand, it quickly became clear that the real intention was to relieve professors of having to teach "boring" courses in Shakespeare and instead allow them to concentrate on trendy, sexualized and politicized work of the sort that has already destroyed English majors from Duke to Berkeley to Brown.

"When I got involved with the controversy originally, I thought that it was a fight over requirements," recalls Joseph Flahive, another member of the paper who spent hours in the school’s Registrar’s Office determining how many people were signing up for what courses. "But as I researched the curriculum, I discovered that what was really going on was the slow axing out of classical literature courses, even if students wanted to take them. For every course in Chaucer that could hold 20 students, 65 or 70 kids were trying to get in." Flahive also discovered that even if courses covering such writers as Dickens and Joyce were technically offered in the course catalog, four years could pass without them being offered once. Meanwhile, many trendier courses (such as "Prison Literature") would go begging for students until the beginning of the semester, when English majors who couldn’t get into other classes were forced into them by default.

This sense of total lack of student input into the gutting of the English curriculum was confirmed at a forum that our paper and other student groups organized; the head of the department likely came to the event expecting to have to answer to a handful of right-wing cranks. Instead, well more than 150 students showed up (pretty good on a campus of 6000), with maybe 90 percent of them calling for a return to standards. Even the national press picked up on the controversy. The Washington Post ran a sympathetic article, and Maureen Dowd wrote a column about the controversy, noting from her Beltway perch that "he may be too white, too male and too dead for Georgetown, but there is no greater writer about politics than Shakespeare."

Most members of the English department and the university administration were not pleased by our efforts–one English professor came close to assaulting me in a men’s room after I dared to distribute copies of The Georgetown Academy on the floor where his office was located. (We did have many faculty sympathizers; however, campus politics being what they are, they had to offer their support sub rosa.) And, while much hue and cry was raised, not much was achieved in terms of rolling back the changes–though English majors must take two courses relating to pre-1850 literature (a slate of offerings that includes "The Bible as Literature: Women in the Hebrew Bible," whose description in the catalog notes that "While feminist criticism has tended to see the Bible as reinforcing and justifying patriarchy, an examination of the gender politics of the text within its historical context suggests possibilities for radical teachings").

Lately, the door has opened for change at Georgetown. President O’Donovan announced that he is stepping down next June, and the search is under way for a new head of the school. Interestingly, because O’Donovan’s tenure was marked by such controversy and crisis (among other things, despite a massive capital campaign, the school is in serious financial trouble), there is talk that the next president should not be a Jesuit. Whoever it is, when it comes to maintaining both the classical standards that make a great university and the Catholic standards that make Georgetown special, the next president could hardly be worse than what has come before.

James Morrow is a senior editor at Ironminds.com.