CAMPUS

Harvard English Department: Veritas, or a rough simulacrum thereof

If you haven’t heard, the Harvard English department is axing its standard, chronological survey classes in favor of loosely organized “seminars” or “modules,” and the news, originally broke by the Harvard Crimson, has really been burning up the Internet. Indeed, there’s been no dearth of fulminating, hand-wringing and apologia.

The Crimson issued a scathing opinion piece, as did Minding the Campus. Inside Higher Education has an in-depth article with Director of the Harvard English Dept. Daniel Donoghue defending the move. Even the New Yorker chimed in, albeit mainly for snarking purposes. (Harold Bloom hasn’t issued his position yet, but I heard that’s only because he was laid low by acute, apoplectic rage upon hearing the news.)

It doesn’t really bother me that the department is making the classes less linear or even moving them to a smaller, discussion-oriented format instead of large-scale lectures. (Actually, I prefer the former.) What is troubling, though, is the class material. From the Minding Campus article:

[P]rofessors are encouraged to organize their seminars’ reading lists around such chin-pulling topics as “Invasion,” “Labor and the Common Good,” and “Internal Dissonances.” The goal is to “train students to connect artistic form and history” and to “introduce” them “to various kinds of diversity: chronological, spatial, generic.” According to Harvard English professor Stephen Greenblatt, the revamping of the English concentration will give students more freedom to fashion their own individualized “journeys” through English literature.

This is all well and good, except that it sounds like graduate level course work, not a series of undergraduate survey classes. How can you understand Shakespeare in the context of his times if you haven’t, y’know, read a lot of Shakespeare? Specifically, how can you extract an anarcho-feminist critique of Hamlet, with regards to gender and identity in the 17th century ( yadda yadda yadda, post-modern blather, etc.) without a firm grounding in the source material?

I believe the colonial, euro-centric idiom here is “putting the cart before the horse.”