However, I disagree when you say that the Jesuits added something to the mission of a university. I would argue they maintained something most universities lost. If we look at where universities came from, we see they built up around the cathedral schools and were always attached to religion. Not only that, but the Church viewed them as part of the divine commission to go and teach all nations and baptize. This is merely a historical question, one to which I do not know the answer, but how familiar was Cardinal Newman with secular universities? Were most universities in his day still tied to an ecclesial establishment? Even our great universities like Harvard and Yale were religious. So religious, in fact, that Yale is a response to Harvard’s loss of religious heritage. Now, they’ve lost that character, so we know that institutions do change, but was Newman only thinking in terms of religious institutions to begin with?

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.”