Goodbye Humanities—Hating White Males Is Not a Curriculum - Minding The Campus
"As the humanities continue their steady slide toward the margins of the campus, the faculty still can’t look in the mirror and face the sources of the problem.
Last month in the Chronicle of Higher Education, four assistant professors of English responded to a previous essay about the state of the field and unintentionally revealed why the humanities have become considerably more unpopular among undergraduates.
The respondents faulted the original essay because, in their eyes, it
“invest[ed] in a certain kind of white male fantasy.”
...There is more.
If you have any nostalgia at all for those boom times, you fail to recognize
“the very necessary unsettling of white male dominance.”
...But at no point does Kay appear to reflect upon how the inequities of this profession are magnified for those who are not white, straight, and male:
people of color, women, queer and trans folk, the nonnormatively bodied, first-generation-college grad students and scholars, single parents, the economic precariat–the list goes on.”
Yes, the list goes on, and it will continue to go on while these identity-fixated people control the disciplines.
And so will the diminishment of literary studies.
The respondents seem to assume that they are defending the field, but in truth, they are
submerging it in a wave of negativity.
For how many 19-year-old students want to take a class taught by teachers with such a racial and sexual chip on their shoulders?
Apart from a batch of social justice kids who relish blaming the White Man for all social ills, few undergraduates find the approach appetizing.
...In this sense, the fixation on a white-male past is nicely self-congratulatory.
It feels good to them, but students discern the self-serving element a lot better than the identitarians suspect.
The profs’ whining about white male dominance is a downer.
They are a joyless, half-learned lot, aiming their passions at presumed oppressors instead of fulfilling their professional duty to pass the beauty and sublimity of the West along to the next generation.
The humanities won’t recover as long as these people are in charge..."
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