Would You Want Any of These People Teaching Your Student?

By George Leef

Wednesday, January 01, 2025

 

English was one of the fields first conquered by the Left in its long march through our institutions and it has steadily grown worse. Today, college English classes are apt to focus mainly on “progressive” obsessions with race, gender, intersectionality, and so on, rather than on clear writing, Shakespeare’s plays, or great novels.

 

If you are looking for evidence of that horrible trend, consider the Modern Language Association (MLA), the professional organization for professors of English. Its meetings are a window into the thinking of its members. In today’s Martin Center article, Graham Hillard looks at the upcoming MLA conference in New Orleans.

 

Hillard writes:

 

The conference program includes among its listed sessions the following gibberish, gossip, and complaint:

 

·        “Contemporary Astrological Media of Minoritarian Self-Making”;

·        “The Queer Conspiracy of Illegibility”;

·        “Against Resilience: Laziness as Refusal”;

·        “How to Be a Woman Though Male: On Uncertainty and Trans Pedagogy”;

·        “Embracing the Low Road? Hating ‘Men’ in Manifestos”;

·        “The (In)Visibility of Claudia Rankine’s and Donald Glovers’s Public Responses to the 2015 Charleston Shooting”;

·        “‘Just a Young Boy in the Hood’: Imaginative Cartographies of the Ends in UK Rap’s Live Performances”;

·        “Third Space: Queering America in Early American Literature.”

 

Sessions devoted to traditional topics in English? Hardly any.

 

Does this matter?

 

Hillard thinks it does: “These are, after all, our professors, the men and women (and other!) who fill literature and language departments from sea to shining sea. To imagine that the ideology fueling “’Storying Youth Climate Activism in the Face of Political Repression’ has no impact on the classroom is naiveté of the highest order. Furthermore, there are, against all odds, still useful English departments and courses in this country. When the many misbehave, the few are swept up in their reputational tsunami.”

 

It’s no wonder that many college grads can’t write a coherent paragraph but are eager to hector you about all of America’s perceived crises.