The Left Destroying Our Ability to Think

 Henry P. Wickham and George P. Harbison have a must read article at the American Thinker entitled Toxic English Departments and the Students Who Now Avoid Them. As the authors point out, studying English, its rich heritage of literature, the grammar of the English language and how to write to most effictively espress your thoughts, is no longer taught at most English Departments. Instead, what is taught is a steaming pile of made up grievances and faux resentments. The Left, as the authors note, always ruins everything it touches. It always sucks the joy and meaning out of everything, and replaces it with what Rush called male bovine excrament.

The decline in the study of undergraduate English proves the proposition that the Left ruins everything it touches There has been a precipitous drop in the number of English majors across the country, and our "progressive" professors have only themselves to blame. The National Center for Education Statistics publishes its annual Digest of what undergraduates study. In 1970 there were roughly 840,000 undergraduate degrees conferred in the United States. Of these approximately 64,000 were degrees in English Literature and Language. This made it the fourth most popular major across the country. Since 1970 there has been a vast increase in the number of undergraduate degrees conferred: over two million in 2020. Yet, despite this huge influx of students, the number of degrees in English has dropped to just over 38,000 in 2020.

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When we were undergraduates at Kenyon College, it had an English Department as formidable as any. The professors were serious about literature, its criticism, and the quality of our written expression. They weren't interested in nurturing resentment, grinding axes, psychotherapy, or the creation of like-minded political cadres. The materials were chosen based on what Mathew Arnold called "the best that has been thought and said in the world." We read the best and worked to understand the authors as they understood themselves. English was a very popular major.

Here is what now passes as a semester course in English literature (English 214) at Kenyon: (Trigger Warning: Take a deep breath and try to get through this; it won't be easy.)

"How do you read gender? How do you read sexuality? How and in what ways have gender and sexuality been written and rewritten? This course serves as an introduction to queer and transfeminist theories and practices in gender and sexuality studies. Conceptualized through its intersections with race, ethnicity, coloniality, class, and ability, the sex/gender system of oppression has long served as a taxonomizing apparatus. And yet, the literary, in league with anticolonial, civil rights, and LGBTQ social movements, not only sheds sharp light on how gender and sexuality are regulated and troubled, but also animates the liberatory potential of imagining embodied relations otherwise. At once world-building and world-shattering, representations of gender and sexuality can leverage critiques against normativity in the same gesture as they bow to reproducing it. Taking our transnational cue from subjugated knowledges and intersectional epistemologies, we’ll constellate the diverging genealogies and methodologies that have shaped the politics and aesthetics as well as the ethics and affects (sic) of gender and sexuality. Against the traffic of binary opposition, we’ll index the possibilities of intimacy and performativity that determine desiring subjects and their objects. As a class collective, our aim will be to read and reread as well as write and rewrite texts that interrogate and complicate how gender and sexuality, as contested sites of pleasure and pain, are embodied and experienced. The geographic and generic focus of this course may vary; for more information, students should contact the instructor. This counts toward the methods requirement for the major and an elective for the women's and gender studies major. Open only to first-year and sophomore students. Prerequisite: ENGL 103 or 104."

when I was in college, I had a natural minor in mathematics, and a second minor in English. But I would never have taken a course described as the above. Now, most engineering students consider English to be unnecessary, but my mother was an English teacher so I knew the need for effective language in any profession. One has to explain what one is doing in in language common people can understand.  Besides, it was interesting. 

But now? Clearly the Left wishes to destroy students ability to speak and write well. But more importantly, language shapes one's thoughts. The better one understands his language, the better one can think. And I don't think the Left wants us to be able to think clearly, since it wants to destroy the United States.